I’m thinking of buying a Sony CMT-HX5BT hifi that can stream music via bluetooth to external speakers. Has anyone had any experience of bluetooth streaming and is it worth doing?

I thought it would be a good idea so I can move the speakers around the house.

cheers

FWIW, normal BT has a range of around three meters, or ten feet. It’s enough to put the speakers either end of a shelf without wires, but not really in another room. WiFi, especially 802.11n has a range three times that. BT is designed for very short range connection.

BT’s data transfer rate is too slow for owt but compressed MP3/WAV type files, no? IE, full-fat uncompressed ‘CD Quality’ music is not possible.

I think.

I may be wrong.

Use wires. Wireless stuff is a right faff. And costs a load more.

Buy a simple decent amp and speakers, not this new-fangled bolleaux.

I thought BT (v2) had a range of 30feet? which would be just about ok. I know my incar bluetooth picks up my phone in the house. I think data streaming is somewhere between 1mbit to 3mbit/second.

Wiki – bluetooth

Version 1.2 – 1 Mbit/s
Version 2 – 3 Mbit/s

Also 3 classes – class 1 = 100 metres, class 2 = 10 metres, class 3 = 1 metre

I’ve been playing with some kit that has up to 250m range via Bluetooth. Up to 20km is possible.

Not really relevant though…

I’ll give it a try, if it doesn’t work I can always get portable ipod dock with speaker.

I use a bluetooth stereo headset with my phone for music, so I can have it in my bag but have the volume etc accessable.
If the quality of the mp3 is higher than 256k then I can experience skipping. But this is a limitaion of the phone (cant encode fast enough), when connected to my laptop I have had no issues.
I can walk round the houe both floors with no issues, think the phone and head set are class 2 devices

That’s a really good idea for riding in headphones actually! Anyone know of any earphones that are bluetooth compatible (not a headset)

This is what i use,
http://www.crutchfield.com/S-o5mp7YCmxoF/p_257HAW700/JVC-HA-W700BT.html
just plug you favourite headphones and away you go.
Sony does something similar as well and im sure there are a few more out there

hmm, sadly my cheapo mp3 player lacks bluetooth…need to find a package that does both sending and receiving of the bluetooth bit!