Dummies, Wireless

Most buyers of the Sonos also buy a local Network Attached Storage (NAS)
hard drive because the Sonos itself doesn’t have one — a non-NAS system
just plays music found elsewhere, such as on your PC. You can also have
more than one Sonos zone player; the players talk to each other and the
controller in a meshlike fashion, so if you have a really long house, you can
still use the Sonos system. In such instances, the Sonos system synchronizes
the music so that it all plays at the same time, avoiding any weird echo-type
sounds around the house. Sonos uses 802.11g for its wireless protocol — and
creates its own mesh network hopping from Sonos to Sonos throughout your
home.
If you want to connect your Sonos system to your existing wireless network
(and to your Internet connection, for playing back Internet radio stations),
you can add in the $99 Sonos Zonebridge, which plugs into an Ethernet port
on your home router and automatically bridges your PC and Sonos wireless
networks.
Putting a Networked PC
in Your Home Theater
Chapter 12: Networking Your Entertainment Center
When you talk about your home entertainment center, you often talk about
sources: that is, devices such as tape decks, AM/FM receivers, phono players,
CD units, DVD players, and other consumer electronics devices that provide
the inputs of the content you listen to and watch through your entertainment
system.
When you think about adding your networked PC or PCs to your entertainment
mix, the PC becomes just another high-quality source device attached
to your A/V system — albeit wirelessly. To connect your PC to your entertainment
system, you must have some special audio/video cards and corresponding
software to enable your PC to “speak stereo.” When the PC is configured
like this, you effectively have a home theater PC (or HTPC, as the cool kids
refer to them). In fact, if you do it right, you can create an HTPC that funnels
audio and video into your system at a higher-quality level than many moderately
priced, stand-alone source components. HTPC can be that good.
You can either buy a ready-to-go HTPC right off the shelf or build one yourself.
We don’t recommend that you build an HTPC unless you have a fair amount
of knowledge about PCs. If that’s the case, have at it. Another obvious point:
It’s much easier to buy a ready-to-go version of an HTPC off the shelf. You can
find out more about HTPCs in Home Theater For Dummies (Pat and Danny
wrote that one, too) by Wiley. What we include here is the short and sweet
version of HTPC.
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