Poor mans Sonos system - it's all relative. :D

acruxksa

I've been drooling over the Sonos multi room wireless systems for a couple years now. While the price has come down a bit, it's still nearly $1000 for a two room system.

Enter the Apple Airport Express. I picked up a couple of these today and now have one hooked up to a set of Bose 2.1 amplified speakers in my Master bedroom, along with one plugged into my Denon 2309 receiver downstairs in the psuedo home theater. Now I just need to pick up an iPod Touch and will have the graphical controls. All for about $550 (I paid less than half what amazon has the Bose speakers listed for).

Eventually I think I'll be picking up another airport express and a couple of Silverstone EB02-S compact amps and mount in wall speakers in my master bedroom and family room. The amps will boost the cost significantly, but I should be able to put a 3 room system together for the cost of a Sonos two room system. Neither system includes the speakers so they'll be a wash.

acruxksa · Posted: Fri, 17 Apr 2009 16:16:20 Post Subject:

So much for saving money, I've recently decided to go with a ZERO 24 BIT/192KHz DAC/Pre-Amp and a Pop Pulse 2024 AKA Tsunami T-Amp. This is quite a bit more $$$ than the Silverstone amp I linked above, but should work quite well. Now I just need to find some good high efficiency speakers, in the meantime I will be using a set of Polk Tsi100's. I have 4 of these for side and rear surround in my 7.1 system, but will have to settle for 5.1 surround until I find another set of speakers, I don't have the amp and pre-amp/dac yet, but am looking forward to it. Next on the list is to re-encode all my music to a lossless format. That's going to take awhile.

Probably should have just bit the bullet and picked up a nice mini tube amp, but don't really see the point since the airport express optical out isn't really considered to be audiophile quality. It should still be pretty good though.

acruxksa · Posted: Wed, 13 May 2009 13:40:21 Post Subject:

Update:

Received the pop pulse 2024 Tsunami T-Amp and Klipsch RB-61 reference speakers. My upstairs living room is now part of a wireless 3 room system and even though the T-Amp only puts out about 6w of clean power at 8 Ohms, the RB-61's superb efficiency allows the setup to play at more than sufficient volumes.

I need to clean up the install and make some speaker stands. entertaining the idea of putting the T-Amp, Airport express and DAC into one case to clean things up a bit. Not sure yet.

Forgot to mention that the Zero DAC arrived with a damaged optical in port so I'm waiting for a new board mounted toslink input connector to repair it, in the meantime I'm using a Super Pro DAC. Works great, but doesn't allow input from other sources like the Zero DAC does.

Also,
I side stepped the remote control issue by installing Salling Clicker on my Nokia E71 and Macbook. Allows me to connect my cellphone to my Macbook via bluetooth and control iTunes from nearly anywhere in the house. Grin

acruxksa · Posted: Thu, 14 May 2009 21:30:09 Post Subject:

Decided to fix the Zero DAC this afternoon and snapped a few crappy cellphone pics. Pretty painless process really, just had to remove the board, desolder a couple broken pins, insert the new toslink connector and solder it's three pins back to the board. The old connector was damaged during shipping and rather than pay to ship the entire unit back to Hong Kong, I had them send me a new connector and replaced it myself. Works great now. When it comes to soldering, the Weller WES51 was one of the best investments I've ever made.

Here's a couple pictures of the Amp, DAC and speakers. Ignore the wires and speakers on the floor. I've still got to build some speaker stands and install everything in my upstairs entertainment center. Threw it together to make sure everything worked.

**Doctor Feelgood** · Posted: Thu, 14 May 2009 21:33:35 Post Subject:

Wow... But is this still a "poor mans" project?

acruxksa · Posted: Thu, 14 May 2009 21:51:31 Post Subject:

nolonger · Rated R Joined: 19 Apr 2009 Posts: 98

Amazing man, simple as that. Sounds like you have quite an awesome system going. I don't know jack about audio, but I'm interested in it, so I'll surely check back on this thread to try and learn something.

gbronzer · Rated PG Joined: 19 May 2009 Posts: 22

Very nice, my solution was some Squeezebox's but those require powered speakers so I bought some studio monitors since they're self powered. This is definitely a nice way to go though.

acruxksa · Posted: Thu, 02 Jul 2009 23:36:25 Post Subject:

It's been nearly 2 months since I put everything together and all I have to say is that the Klipsch RB-61's paired with the Pop Pulse T-Amp and Super Pro DAC 707 simply ROCK! I had to pull the Zero DAC because it's got some over heating issues and to be honest, the Super Pro DAC 707 sounds much cleaner to me anyway. I'm currently listening to some Alison Krauss at 320Kbps and live mixing board recordings of the Grateful Dead from April/May of this year (also 320Kbps) and am extremely happy! Haven't gotten around to re-ripping any of my CD's to apple lossless and may not get to it for awhile. Most of my music lately has been via Amazon 256Kbps/VBR and I'm pretty happy with it as well.

Almost forgot, I also built some stands based on a design I found on the net. It's basically a Home Depot special, purchased a couple feet of 1x10 and 1x12 clear pine, 2 3' lengths of allthread, washers and nuts to fit, a couple 32" sections of 3" PVC pipe and some flat black paint. Pulled the router out and spent a couple hours making them. I also purchased some sand/small fishtank rock and polyfill (used for tank filters) at the local Petco and filled the PVC about 2/3 full of sand and then packed the remaining space with poly fill. Gives the stands a very nice heft and keeps them from resonating. Here's a crappy pic of one of them.