Wireless Audio done right.

With an open mind, I introduced the Sony wireless speakers to my wife. I explained that they were a complete bargain, and that if we didn't want them, I could probably re-sell them to someone at work. She was quite keen to get some music back into the living room. Our DVD player, which was used to play CDs, has migrated to another room, and music on a MacBook's speakers is obviously compromised.

After a quick demo, while she was out of the house earlier, I started to set them up properly. As I was setting them up, I discovered that our Airport Express, which I'd bought to augment a dead spot right where my wife sits on the couch, was now very close to our AV cupboard. My son had moved it a little while back.

Rather than plug in the Sony kit, I figured I might be able to hook up the Airport Express. We've a bit of an unconventional setup. Virgin V+ and Sky boxes hooked up to an old Phillips video sender, which is routed to Aego-M 2.1 speakers (fantastic) and an NEC projector (feeling its age now), which projects straight onto the living room wall, giving us a 70" picture. If the video sender is transmitting, it kills WiFi, so it's just used to switch sources. it has 4 in and 1 out, so here were 2 spare inputs.

A quick nose through my boxes of cables and connectors yielded a SCART to Phono converter (the kind you get with a PS2 or a Wii) and a 3.5mm jack to Phono cable. Perfect. I hooked it up, fired up iTunes on my MacBook Pro, the Remote App on my iPod Touch, paired them, and had audio out of the Aegos straight away.

I did briefly have a problem with Remote losing the ability to connect to iTunes. The settings were correct. The interwebs suggested a firewall problem. My firewall settings were fine, but something was screwing up with it. I switched the firewall off, reconnected, and turned the firewall on again, and it's been fine ever since.

The Remote app is brilliant. Fantastic. It can switch between multiple libraries, and it can re-route audio to either the Mac's speakers or the Airport connected speakers (or both). It's also far faster than I'd expect. I have a fairly large library (12,000+ songs), and it takes seconds to connect, seearch etc. It's as though the library is on the iPod.

This is how it's meant to be. The Sony system goes back on Monday. Turns out an 83% discount doesn't matter if the product is fundamentally flawed. Docking an iPod touch or an iPhone takes it out of your hand, and that's just wrong.

People accuse me of fanboyism, but it's only partly true. Apple generally make stuff that's better than everyone else, but often it's just because it sucks less than everyone else rather than being phenomenally good. iTunes + Airport Express + Remote is an example of phenomenally good.
but they absolutely nailed this.

With Airplay coming to third party devices, this is only going to get better.