WIFI Music Bridge?

[Tosicc]

I was hoping to stream music wirelessly from my laptop as cheaply as possible and a friend turned me on to the Linksys WMB54G Music Bridge... I was wondering if the gurus of PC audio had any better/cheaper solutions or am I safe to order?

http://www.amazon.com/Cisco-Linksys...r=1-1&keywords=WMB54G+Wireless-G+Music+Bridge

some info on my setup:
W7 Laptop
Rokit 5 monitors connected by RCA to 3.5mm

 

[Impulse]

Seems to have fairly lukewarm results, much of it stems from a flaky install process which im sure anyone with some networking knowledge can overcome, but there are some comments about the driver not working in Win7 and requiring some workarounds (and it does depend on a fairly tricky driver since it installs itself as a virtual sound card apparently).

I dunno, its certainly cheap, but I think there are more I tuitive solutions these days... I'm assuming you meant streaming music FROM your laptop btw, no? (to a stereo or home theater or just the Rokits located elsewhere) A more modern solution might add features like smartphone remote control etc, Internet stations/services w/o requiring a PC, etc.

 

[Impulse]

To add to that, I wasn't trying to discourage you from trying it out... I'd just make sure there won't be any issues with Win7 64-bit first, since it's heavily dependent on audio drivers and it's a fairly old product. For straight streaming from a PC the idea of installing it as a virtual sound card does seem rather novel.

Any other solution I can think of would either be Bluetooth based (which will compress the stream, but has the advantage of not needing a network and being cheap, $40 tops for two adapters) or would cost $80+. It seems low budget dedicated audio streamers are rather rare now days...

They've either gone the route of elaborate multi room setups like Sonos (or even Squezebox, which I could've swore used to have cheaper models) or they've just been folded into the typical $80-99 multi-use streaming box (Roku, WDTV, AppleTV, Netgear's WiDi box, etc.).

Edit: The other option, which would cost you nothing, is setting the laptop down next to the speakers and using a phone or tablet on the same network as the remote... There's dozens of ways of doing that, iTunes remote, foobar plugins/apps, etc.