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[Mr ChriZ]

I'm looking for someway of getting 2 channel sound from my laptop and phones to my amplifier wirelessly.
The amp currently has no computer attached to it and I'm currently on a limited budget.
What I'm thinking of is some kind of bluetooth gizmo.
One of my mates has this little portable speaker he hooks phones and such like via bluetooth and it seems to work well.
So I'm thinking something like that but with phono connections for my stereo amp, with as good sound quality as possible on a budget.

Anyone got any experiences with something like this?
Thanks,
Chris

[Mr ChriZ]

Has anyone played with an Arcam rBlink?

[Mr ChriZ]

I ended up purchasing a Nokia MD310, which is significantly cheaper than the Arcam device.

So far I'm a bit half an halves with it.

The device itself is a pretty little circular thing.  Very aesthetically pleasing with faint glowing led's indicating what the device is doing.
It has a built in NFC gizmo so if you have an NFC phone you can just wave it over the top of the device and theoretically the phone should just pick it up and connect.  So far I've found this part of it seems to work a bit 50/50 and I've no idea why.

The audio quality is what I'd consider OK.  The range is good plenty of bass and no problems with the highs and the volume is sufficient going into my 2 channel 50 watt amp.  However the sound itself seems to have that electronic compression sound like a slightly low bit rate MP3. Not bad enough to be really irritating but if you're listening to good vocals it is noticeable when compared to my CD player or plugged in directly.

I've discovered that there's a technology called Apt-x which the device can use which can improve the quality.  Apparently my Samsung S3 would be using this, but I can't say I noticed the quality being better with that device to my laptop which doesn't have it.  So maybe I just need to play around more with this.

One issue I have had is that the Bluetooth and wifi signals are massively interfering with each other. With the device turned on not only were my devices struggling to keep a wifi connection it actually appears to be causing my 'Virgin Media' router to keep restarting it's wifi service. At some point this weekend I'm tempted to put the wifi router into the 5GHZ mode and see if matters improve.

On my laptop I seem to be forced to use DirectSound rather than WASAPI in Media Center.  I'm not sure if this is an issue with the bluetooth dongle or something else.  Otherwise it works just fine

[Mr ChriZ]

After playing around with this a bit more I've got a more direct comparison of the apt-x on my phone versus the non apt-x audio on my laptop.  I think my previous experience on the phone was hampered by the fact I was streaming.  The difference is actually quite big.  On my phone now I can no longer here the compression artefacts I mentioned before.  The quality certainly good enough that it's very listenable too as far as I'm concerned. I'm sure the more discerning audiophile might have a problem with it but for me this is working well.

I'm going to try and pick up an Apt-x bluetooth usb dongle for my laptop to see if I can better quality there as well.
Somehow at the moment I've knocked out the bluetooth audio on my laptop all together.   I tried updating the dell drivers and now it won't play ball at all.

The 5GHZ wifi idea didn't work so well either.   It reduced the range of the wifi to about 5 meters from the router, meaning most of the house had no wifi.
I think I'm going to buy a better router.  The virgin media super hub is renowned for having a bad range.

One step forward two steps back.