Untangle Your Living Room: Four Ways to Go Wireless

These products can help you reduce the number of cords cluttering your home theater setup.

Contributing Editor Dan Tynan is at the end of his rope.

It started when my wife brought home a cabinet for our home entertainment gear and a desk for the kids' PC. New furniture meant moving all of our old stuff, so I immediately embarked upon the Great Rewiring Project.

I spent 3 hours tangled in cables--attaching the satellite box (component), TiVo (coaxial), DVD player (S-Video), VCR (composite), and A/V receiver (RCA) to my 3M digital projector. I also plugged and unplugged the Wi-Fi router, cable modem, mouse, keyboard, monitor, printer, scanner, speakers, subwoofer, and about 3279 power cords.

When I finished, I had wires all over the place and a migraine the size of Montana. I thought, "Surely there's a better way." So I looked and I looked, but I couldn't find a totally wireless solution. I did, however, locate some products that let me reduce the wires tangling up my life.

Connect the wireless transceiver of the Sharp Aquos LC-15L1U-S ($1399) to your cable box and DVD player, and you can haul this battery-powered, 15-inch LCD TV around your house and watch live TV or movies almost anywhere. It's a neat idea; unfortunately, positioning the set more than about 20 feet from the transmitter caused the picture to freeze up or drop frames. (Sharp says that the maximum range is 50 feet; your mileage may vary.) I also noticed a time lag when changing channels.

With the Pioneer XW HT-1 wireless speaker ($250), you can easily turn your living room into a surround-sound theater without snaking cable across your carpet. Connect the transmitter to the red-and-white RCA jacks of a TV, DVD player, or A/V receiver; then plug the dual rear-speaker unit into the wall. The XW HT-1 sounds great, but the 6-foot power cord limits where you can put the dang thing.

Even better, Xitel's Soundaround ($100) employs complex algorithms to deliver an amazingly rich sonic experience for existing two-speaker systems. The box is the size of a paperback novel and takes 10 seconds to set up: Just plug your DVD player or game console into the Soundaround and then connect it to your receiver. If you were thinking of investing in a five-speaker home system, Soundaround can help you save cash and avoid the hassle of running more wires.

The Sonos Digital Music System ($1499 for Bundle II with two pairs of speakers) is a cool way to move music around your house. Connect Sonos's ZonePlayer to an ethernet port on your Wi-Fi router, and you can stream MP3 files from your computer's hard disk to Sonos's wired stand-alone speakers. You can put a ZonePlayer in each room in your house (you get two ZonePlayers to start) and beam different songs to each at the same time. Or you can plug a stereo receiver into a ZonePlayer's RCA jacks and wirelessly pipe that music (or sound) to a ZonePlayer located in another room. The speakers sound great, and setup is easy as pie (though $1500 is a lot to spend to avoid a rat's nest).

More help is on the way. Next year we'll start to see devices using UltraWideBand (UWB) technology--which offers far more bandwidth than Bluetooth or RF--to replace cables for printers and other PC peripherals, says Kurt Scherf, vice president of Dallas research firm Parks Associates. We may also see devices using the emerging 802.11n wireless standard to replace cables for streaming high-definition video signals. (For info on so-called Pre-N Wi-Fi extender products, see the April News and Trends article "Stretching Wi-Fi.")

As for that quagmire of power cords? The only wireless technology in sight is "God and lightning bolts," jokes Scherf. Let us pray.