I received an e-mail from Sarah asking, “How can I plug in my iPod to listen to in various rooms in my house? Could I also listen to it outside?”
The iPod, which is a brand name for what is generically known as an MP3 player, is a great advance in music storage, and will probably replace the CD player before too long. The ability to store hundreds of tunes and access them with ease, all contained within a tiny mechanism that’s smaller than a cell phone, means we can access our personalized library of songs anywhere and anyplace.
The primary use of an MP3 player is to carry it with you and listen to your music privately on “ear buds”. But it’s such a handy device, and it is your own personalized selection, it would be great to be able to hear it on your home stereo, and even better to be able to hear it and control it from anywhere in your home.
The answer to Sarah’s questions is in two parts. The first (and easiest) task is to connect it to your receiver. And the second part is to distribute what’s in your receiver to the various rooms and even outside.
There are many inexpensive ways to play your iPod through speakers. The most common is to buy an inexpensive player with a built-in dock for the iPod and integrated speakers. This essentially turns your iPod into a boombox. Maybe not the best quality sound, but portable and inexpensive. With this, of course, you can plug it in anywhere you like, even out on the deck, to listen to it.
If you would rather hook the iPod up to your home stereo, to take advantage of better speakers and amplification, there are also a number of options. A simple adaptor cable will do the trick. It has a 3.5 mm. plug on one end to connect to the headphone jack on the player and the standard analog red and white audio RCA connectors on the other end to plug into an auxiliary input on your receiver. With this setup, both the iPod and the receiver will control the volume. It’s best to leave the iPod volume at about halfway and then control it with the receiver volume control.
Or you can buy an iPod dock that has a line level output, to which you can attach the standard red and white RCA cables that go to your receiver. This type of dock will output a fixed line level, which reduces complications because with it only the receiver volume control will affect the loudness. A dock like this may also include a remote control, to save you having to walk up to it to change selections.
To play the music on your iPod in any room of the house without carrying the unit from room to room, you need a music distribution system. That’s a whole different undertaking. It requires speakers in each room and separate amplification channels for each speaker. You have to run cables from a centralized amplifier to the speaker pairs in each room.
It also means you have to come up with a way to control the iPod from whatever room you’re in. Listening to the music outside can be part of a system like this, with the outdoor speakers acting as just another zone of music. As you can imagine, when you start adding up the cost of all these speakers and all these channels of amplification it will be a lot more than a “boombox” iPod dock. But a system like this can incorporate much more than just your iPod. It can play music from many different sources, including CD’s, Galaxy channels on satellite or cable, a cassette player, or even a turntable.
The best way to take advantage of the iPod’s personalized storage capacity is to use it with a centrally located music server. A music server is essentially a dedicated computer with all your music files stored digitally. Usually a system like this can also store movies, even in high definition. It can integrate fully with an iPod with two-way communication.
When you place your iPod on a special dock its contents are automatically relayed to the music server and you can then control all the variables on the iPod with touchscreens in each room that have a graphic display to show you the name of the tune, the artist, the genre, etc. And in addition to working with your iPod, a system like this can handle all the other music sources you may have.
There is another possibility that you can explore if you have a computer network in your home. MP3’s are computer files and, as such, they can be transported around a local area network. You originally store your song selections on your computer and then transfer them to your iPod for portable listening, but if you have a computer network, you can skip the iPod altogether and just listen to the songs on the computers that you have in various rooms.
Of course, computer speakers are not necessarily the optimum for audio enjoyment and if you want to be able to play the music through a regular receiver and speakers, you would have to have an audio card to which you would connect the RCA cables between the computer and the receiver in the same way you would with the iPod dock mentioned above.
The one rule to keep in mind if you are playing your iPod through stereo speakers is that what sounds great on your little “earbuds” may not be so impressive on good quality speakers. There will be some degradation of sound quality if you are taking it out of an earphone jack and sending it to an amplifier with an adapter cable.
The quality will be better with the more costly centrally located music server. But it will only be as good as your bitrate. You can adjust the compression to squeeze more songs on the iPod but when you do you impair the sound quality. If you are planning to play the tunes through a good stereo or multi-room system, you would be well advised to record them originally with the highest quality (and lowest quantity) bitrate available.
Bill Monahan is a “smart home” specialist who has been in the construction industry for thirty years, with the last twelve devoted exclusively to residential electronics. While he provides and installs products he sees his main mission as making homeowners comfortable with the new technologies.
