Want to listen to your entire music collection from any room in your house? In the old days, such a whole-house audio system required lots of expensive equipment and the services of a professional installer. That's not the case today; all you need is a PC running Windows Media Center, a few low-cost
Media Center Extenders, and an audio system in every room you want to connect. The result is a whole-house audio system that lets you listen to all the digital music stored on your PC -- even music ripped from CDs and downloaded from the Internet!
Digital Audio in Every Room -- Thanks to Windows Media CenterIf you go to a professional installer and ask for a whole-house audio system, you'll have to lay out some big bucks for a lot of fancy equipment -- typically a central CD jukebox, a multizone distribution amplifier, and in-wall controllers and remote speakers in each room. As you might suspect, this type of system doesn't come cheap; we're talking tens of thousands of dollars, and a lot of involved installation.
A better solution is to first digitalize all your music, and then beam that digital music throughout your house over your home network. Digitalizing your music is as simple as ripping all your CDs to hard disk; you can use the popular MP3 file format, which doesn't require a lot of hard disk space, or the WMA Lossless format for better sound quality.
Once your music is digital, it can be played on any personal computer. What you want, however, is a computer that's running Microsoft's Windows Media Center, which is a special interface that sits on top of the Windows operating system. Media Center is a "
ten-foot interface," designed for use in a living room environment, operated via handheld remote control. If your current PC doesn't have Media Center installed, you may need to buy a new
Media Center PC for this particular purpose.
While you could put a
Media Center PC in every room of your house, this isn't necessary. Media Center lets you stream digital music from the main
Media Center PC to other connected devices, called
Media Center Extenders. The streaming is via your home network, either wired (Ethernet) or wireless (WiFi).
What makes using a
Media Center Extender so attractive for whole house audio is that it's extremely easy to install, no professionals are required, and it costs you only a few hundred dollars. (Plus the expense of a small TV and audio system in each room, of course.) You can connect a
Media Center Extender to any audio system, from a simple boom box to a bookshelf system to a high-end audiophile quality system. Use the system you have, or buy a cheap system to extend your system to additional rooms.
How Media Center Extenders WorkPutting Together the SystemRemember, whatever you select to play on your
Media Center Extender is completely independent from what's playing on your main
Media Center PC, or on other Extenders. Each device operates independently from the others, so you could have up to six different songs or playlists playing on five separate Extenders plus the main PC. It's a great way to share all those songs you've downloaded from the Internet or ripped from CD -- and the perfect 21st-century whole house audio system.
Michael Miller is a writer and commentator on technology and digital lifestyle topics. 
