Hi, I'm looking for an inexpensive solution to 'bridge' audio, from the line-out of one device, to the line-in of essentially outdoor speakers/amp. It needs to be transported over IP -- TCP or UDP is fine - basically, transport should be packets supported on consumer switches and WiFi AP's. For the scenario, think: being able to follow the action of a sports broadcast when I go from home-theater room, to outside my house, where my outdoor speakers are. I always want the outdoor speakers to be a 'slave' to the indoor 'master' - and not control them independently.
I'm not aware of any 'bridge' device pairs that will tunnel audio over IP from a 'transmitter' to a 'receiver.' Devices like this exist for Bluetooth... but, I need to span a large distance, and figure I should be able to leverage the my wired/WiFi home network to achieve this, and not worry about audio quality; bluetooth profiles; signal strength - etc. Bridge pairs like this also exist for extending HDMI - but these are typically not IP; they just use a Cat5/6 cable for transport.
Thoughts? Does such a device exist? I have a spare laptop - I'm wondering if a reasonable solution would be to set the laptop up to stream the audio coming into a mic port, over the home network to an Airplay receiver (i.e. the $50-ish Airport Express variety).
I'm not aware of any 'bridge' device pairs that will tunnel audio over IP from a 'transmitter' to a 'receiver.' Devices like this exist for Bluetooth... but, I need to span a large distance, and figure I should be able to leverage the my wired/WiFi home network to achieve this, and not worry about audio quality; bluetooth profiles; signal strength - etc. Bridge pairs like this also exist for extending HDMI - but these are typically not IP; they just use a Cat5/6 cable for transport.
Thoughts? Does such a device exist? I have a spare laptop - I'm wondering if a reasonable solution would be to set the laptop up to stream the audio coming into a mic port, over the home network to an Airplay receiver (i.e. the $50-ish Airport Express variety).