Home Theater Gear

Wireless outdoor speakers are great for making your time around the yard much more enjoyable. Installing outdoor speakers is growing in popularity as people want to spend more time outdoors and enjoy it more. This is tailor made for those who entertain. One of the biggest obstacles encountered by folks wanting to bring their favorite music outside with them is the need to run speaker wire.

Up to now you had two choices; either tack unsightly wire or conduit up the side of your house, or spend a lot of money or time retrofitting the wires to the speaker locations. Wireless speakers? They just didn't sound good enough for all but the most basic installations, and if you any sort of audiophile aspirations you were out of luck altogether.

What about an iPOD or other MP3 player? Well, that would be great if you were the antisocial type and wanted to hang around with a pair of headphones on. If you're entertaining that is a pretty poor solution though. Hence the need for honest to goodness speakers that play music throughout your yard.

How about just bringing out a boom box? You could do that, but you'll get no access to your music collection, and in most cases the sound quality from these leaves a bit to be desired.

Technology waits for no one, and this has never been more true than with the wireless speakers now available for outdoor applications. The advent of powerful digital signal processing and digital transmission technologies, in some cases coupled with digital amplifiers that actually sound good, has enabled speaker engineers to develop some products that only 5 years ago would have been tremendously expensive, if you could get them at all.

Now, companies such as Soundcast systems have released products like the Outcast. The Outcast is one of the new class of high quality wireless outdoor speakers you can buy now. One of the secrets to their success is the use of the same Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum (FHSS) originally developed for secure, military, communications. It is now widely used by cordless telephone manufacturers to give their upper end cordless phones range and clear sound.

By all accounts the Outcast gives remarkable sound quality for a wireless speaker, but you'll pay a premium for that added build and sound quality. If you want a taste of that premium sound quality on a smaller budget, you can now get the Outcast Jr, a smaller version of the Outcast.

Even lower end outdoor speakers such as the more conventional 900MHz wireless rock speakers from companies such as TIC, Advent, and Audio unlimited are much better than others of their ilk from just half a decade ago. These just have a 900MHz radio transmitter with an RCA input for whatever source you want to use. This feeds a receiver in the speaker. Most of these type units are mono, but still fit the bill for getting your music where you want it with reasonable sound quality. They are about a third the cost of the Outcast systems.

Sony recently announced their new Altus wireless multi room audio system. This uses their S-AIR 5GHz technology first introduced a year ago to stream music around the house. While they as yet do not have a dedicated outdoor speaker option, their indoor speakers are so easy to move around that it would be a snap to remove them in times of bad weather, or when the sprinklers came on.

For another angle at getting your music outdoors, Logitech has their Squeezebox wireless media players. While not speakers, you can easily connect them to a set of outdoor speakers to get music stored on your computer playing outside with no wires. These babies have a really slick remote available that allows you to get feedback from your computer so you can change playlists, or find songs to fit your current mood. You'll also be able to get Internet radio, Rhapsody (you'll have to pay for this), and Pandora on the Squeezebox to really expand your listening options.

This should give you a taste of what is available to get your music from indoors to out without running new wires or opening up the windows and cranking up the volume inside.

Apologies for not writing this at the beginning of summer..