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Suppose I just wanted to wirelessly (WiFi, not infrared) transmit mp3s from my laptop to a wireless 802.11b/g 'media receiver' taht's physically connected to my AV setup -- would I need to buy an external router/base station (the thingy with the antenna) that would hook up to my laptop, plus a network card for the laptop, or are there 'all in one' network adapter cards that can do both? And are media receivers -- which mainly seem to do the decoding of the transmitted data -- always necessary? Are there any devices that wirelessly receive a decoded transmission and simply pass it on to the physical connection to the AVR, in PCM form? Or what if ones AVR has its own MP3 decoder, could the data simply be passed into the AVR undecoded? I'm trying to imagine the simplest possible *wireless* setup involving a laptop and an AV receiver, involving litlte or no redundancy of function and the fewest separate components.

(That is, I realize it would be simplestl to physically connect an mp3-loaded laptop running some sort of media server/player software, to an AVR, via the laptop's soundcard outputs...but I'm wondering about wireless.)

Here's what I do:

PC (MP3 server)

Cat-5 wired to ->

802.11 access point

wireless to ->

802.11 bridge

Cat-5 wired to ->

Audiotron (MP3 browser/decoder)

SPDI/F wired to ->

Receiver digital in

I've got some extra jiggery-pokery in there because the Audiotron doesn't support wireless natively (it's only got an Ethernet port).

It's possible to configure two wireless cards to talk to each other in "ad hoc" mode rather than "infrastructure" mode, and eliminate the need for an access point:

http://www.hardavenue.com/reviews/adhocguide.shtml

This may work for what you're doing, and allow you to make a wireless-enabled MC and the laptop's wireless card to talk directly. (I use infrastructure mode with an access point because I've got other wireless devices to deal with and it's easier to manage all that centrally.)

(The Audiotron has no storage of it's own and simply pulls MP3 files off any SMB-shared drive (WinNT/2000/XP, Linux with Samba) and plays them. It has it's own selection/playlist/shuffle modes. You can control it from the front panel, a remote, or via a web browser from any computer on the network. (You can really geek out if you have an 802.11-enabled PDA -- you can use it with the web browser interface as a super-remote.) Linksys and Creative make similar things now with built-in wireless, but the Audiotron is most flexible.)

There may well be a receiver out there with wireless and MP3 decoding built-in, which would be the simplest solution, but I don't know of one. (I've seen mini-systems that do this, but not a true A/V receiver.)

Ryan

Then there's this:

http://netgear.com/promotions/mp101_promo.php

Yep, that's very similar to the Turtle/Creative/Linksys boxes.

The thing I like about the Audiotron is that it doesn't need any software on the PC -- you just point it to a directory with MP3s in it and it indexes everything itself based on tags. The others all want to run off an app loaded on the PC. No biggie, but it's just one less thing eating up resources on my PC.

Ryan