[threedee]

Here's complicated one.

I've recently bought Philips HD1500u's, connected loads of stuff to it (PS2, Wii, TV, X-Fi, dvd player).

I also bought a 17" laptop.

Now, i'd like to get sound from laptop to receiver wirelessly, so i could move around the house with headphones and laptop.

Purpose of all this is watching DVDs in bed, with proper DH

Now, i'm thinking that it would be possible to beam sound thru wireless lan to my downstairs X-Fi equipped pc, which in turn would feed sound into amp/decoder, which, in turn will beam back to headphones.

Why so complicated ? its all for Dolby Headphone. There is no way my laptop audio can ever reproduce DH over its crappy audio chip.

I think there may be some server/client solution for this... one can hope, right ?

AC3 and MP3 serving needed. Say i run mplayerc ir winamp on my laptop, but sound comes thru wireless headphones amp/dec that are connected to downstairs pc.

Network is of Y shape - top ends of Y are X-Fi PC and laptop, lines connect at wireless router and the bottom line is out to adsl.

anyone tried this in practice ?

 

[DefectiveAudioComponent]

One solution that's quite easy:
PC running iTunes, sending audio to an Airport Express wlan unit with optical audio out. You then feed that into a DAC with optical in, and then to an amp, and then to your headphones.

If you first convert audio to analog through a DAC in your AMP decoder, and then want to send that wirelessly to your headphone then, you get this additional step: Analog to digital (reversing what your AMP did), then send wirelessly, and then another DAC at the headphone end. That's not going to improve the audio quality.

So, you need the DAC and headphone amp attached by wire to your headphones. Therefore, I would suggest you have the audio receiver there. You could also use a Squeezebox to receive the audio, and then either use a (better?) external dac, or just go directly to a headamp.

 

[threedee]

Converting is out of the question. Whats the point in converting digital 5.1 to anything else in case i need proper DH ? I need a sort of pass-thru for sound to be served downstairs in its raw form (ac3) so that my x-fi can feed it to amp untouched.

Moving receiver is out of the question too.

What i'm looking for is synchronized sound playback on both machines while laptop retains full control and downstairs machine being slave only for feeding my philips amp/dec thru either optical or coax digital.

 

[infinitesymphony]

Squeezebox 3?

 

[threedee]

how does that help ? no ac3 - no point. besides, i dont want to connect another wired thing to my laptop.

 

[infinitesymphony]

Convert AC3 to PCM in software...

Otherwise, I think you've created an impossible scenario, unless you want to custom manufacture your own devices and write your own drivers.

So, this device must:

1. Interface with the built-in wireless adapter of your local computer.
2. Read the wireless signal and pick out the parts that involve sound transmission (in addition to having a software component on your computer that encodes the audio into a wireless signal).
3. Have a digital output that allows AC-3 pass-through.

Good luck...