Wireless audio Report, Via bluetooth

Just wanted to post a nugget of knowledge I discovered over the weekend. I had been searching for some wireless multi-channel audio solutions and started looking into bluetooth.

So I’m using 2 *(Motorola DC800) as an audio transmitter coming out of an 828, and I’m using 2 *(Motorola HT820) as receivers (for now until I get the guts out of them) and I was able to pair each transmitter/receiver discretely and send different audio signals to each set of headphones simultaneously. So while not the cheapest solution ever, it seems to be working.

For the next step I’m going to try the Motorola S705 as a receiver since it supports both bluetooth class 1 and A2DP.

The audio quality is OK, better than what most 128 kps mp3s sound like, but not much better.

The audio signal is definitely delayed so this would cause some issues syncing to video (unless you just delayed the video) however, I have not determined yet if both of the delays are exactly the same.

For the record I attempted to send audio directly from the computer to the headsets via bluetooth. I did get the control panel to recognize two different headsets, and it would send audio discretely to one or the other, never two different signals simultaneously, and never the same signal to both simultaneously.
I even opened two instances of Max and both headsets did show up in the DSP panel (they where identically named) however Max never let me select the second headphone as an audio output (even though it appeared in the drop down menu). Every time it would default back the first instance of the HT820.
Also, any audio that I did manage to send directly from the mac bluetooth transmitter was of such a low quality that it was essentially unusable since OS 10.4 does not support A2DP (it is rumored that 10.5 will support A2DP).

My general feeling is that sending multi-channel audio via bluetooth is an OS X issue and not a Max issue. However, with individual bluetooth transmitters this can be accomplished. I’ll keep this updated as I do some more testing.

Casey