Music Everywhere

I have a fantastic computer (as you might imaging given what I do for a living) and I have ripped all my CDs onto it giving me a reasonably impressive music library (if you are impressed by Marillion and The Sisters of Mercy). However, I have been struggling to find an easy way of listening to this fine library of sound anywhere else, for example in the garden. In the past I have put a guitar amp in the garden and draped a long lead out of the living room window to connect it to the computer, but the sound is not great and the aesthetics are worse. Of course I could just feed CDs into a ghetto blaster but that is soooo 90s!

I knew there must be a better way but I couldn't find it. There are systems like the Sonos which will enable you to play music in every room in the house but an "introductory" pack to get two rooms going romps in at nearly £1200. That is a bit steep for listening to "The Temple of Love" while munching a burger at a BBQ. You could virtually hire the band for that.

I also looked at devices like the Squeezebox and Transporter but again, starting at £200 they were just over engineered and over priced for what I wanted. I was starting to think that perhaps I just wished for a product that simply didn't exist. Until I came across these fellas yesterday. They are AQsound Wireless Speakers from the appropriately named I want one of those.

As you can see from the pictures, they look mighty fine sitting there in the garden pumping out a bit of Oasis.

Obviously, no wires in sight. They run on 6 AA batteries each. This enables them to be very loud with great sound quality. They have a claimed range of 100 meters. I don't know if that is true - but they still worked with no sound degradation at the bottom of our garden. If you are worried about them eating through too many batteries then they come with an adapter for each speaker as well so they can be powered from the mains.

All you need next to the computer is the wireless box (the little silver space ship thing in the middle) that plugs into the headphone socket. Smart. Of course this could also be used with a hi-fi, iPod or any other noise creating system that has a output socket of some kind.

Over all, very highly recommended.