CTA Digital IP-AST Wireless Air Sound Transmitter Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)I've been looking for a wireless transmitter to play music and various sounds from my laptop through either my Mackie monitors in my room, or the sound system in the living room.
Oddly enough, there isn't much out there that meets this rather simple requirement. Most products seem to require you to only play sounds from certain software (such as iTunes, or MusicMatch). A device that plugs into your soundcard is unusually rare, unless you went for an FM transmitter which I've had bad experiences with in the past (although, I've only ever tried cheap ones).
I almost went for the Logitech solution, but the vendor software and reports of incompatibility worried me, although I liked the idea of the USB connection over a stereo jack link to my soundcard headphone socket.
I took a chance on this little gizmo from CTA and was really surprised. Information on the web about this item seems almost non-existant which made me more wary, but it had the exact features I wanted and was cheap enough to give it a shot, but expensive enough to make me think it might actually work.
Even when it came, the rather blurred font labelling the ports increased my skeptiscm. My mood was lifted to find that everything you need, including cables to get it working was included.
The receiver, is a very small aluminium box with a dainty little arial as pictured. It connects to a rather discrete lump-in-a-cord-design power pack. A mini 3.5mm stereo jack is the output which connects to your amp, or powered speakers. It has a blue LED that tells you when a connection to a the transmitter has been found. (a note, there are 16 channels which you can select from to avoid interference, although I didn't need to despite the 50 or so wireless networks in my apartment block).
The transmitter looks exactly the same, except in addition to a 3.5mm stereo jack it has a type B USB port which I wasn't expecting. Essentially what you have when you connect this is an external sound card connected via USB which should result in better sound quality than connecting it via an analog cable (a cheap analog cable if you use the one provided).
Despite the advantages of a USB connection, I would rather keep it simple and get the thing working before I tried that. So, I went for the 3.5mm stereo jack (this config requires the transmitter be also plugged into a power pack, not something I liked, but I guess long term it's better than batteries).
Amazing!! Music was coming from my montiors!! Not just any music. Good fidelity music with a fairly low noise floor!! I was amazed. This thing works, and it works rather well. It certainly wasn't as good as a good quality cable, but for a wireless device it was pretty good considering how terrible FM transmitters are. The only annoying thing was it seemed to attenuate the signal quite a lot, but not so much I ran out of headroom.
I decided to try the USB cable. PnP it says in the manual. I was skeptical again...what no driver disk to try when Windows inevitably can't find my device??
Damn. It was right! XP recognised the device as a sound card almost instantly and I started streaming music again to my speakers. It was so easy this thing could have been made by Apple.
The attenuation problem disappeared so dramatically I was reaching for the volume control in a hurry! The quality also seemed much better also. Figures, since the cables that ship with the device are probably pretty terrible. But I feel that the problem is actually the device encoding the analog signal into a digital format which it sends via the 2.4GHz transmitter which the receiver then has to turn back to analog again. I'm not sure what magic exactly happens in the transmitter, but there is still some quality loss somewhere in the chain even using USB, but only noticible if you really listen for it (in my case I could only hear the slight noise when there was no music being sent from my laptop).
The slight hissing problem was also pretty much fixed by playing with the arials. I have a feeling my wireless network (802.11g) was interferring with the signal since they use the same frequency band.
Overall, I give this 5 stars. It does exactly what it is supposed to do and it does it well. A better hi-fi version would be nice, but at this price that seems most unfair to ask for. I have a feeling if my stereo had fairly standard speakers there would be no noticiable difference in fidelity at all. Considering I have pretty good quality studio monitors and can still use this without resorting back to my trusty cable is pretty darn impressive.
Why there aren't more products on the market that do what this does really suprises me. Everything seems geared around playing media files etc, but nothing that just plays what you hear on your computer through a remote sound source.
As you can probably tell, I'm really happy with this product.

Click Here to see more reviews about: CTA Digital IP-AST Wireless Air Sound Transmitter

The Sound Port from CTA digital is the perfect solution to satelite radio customers that need to have their receivers located in one area at all times. With the Sound Port, you can set your satelite radio receiver where it receives its strongest reception, plug it into the transport base and stream the audio signal wirelessly to the receiver base station that's attached to your audio output source. It is also perfect for streaming music from your computer or MP3 Player to your home stereo system or other audio output devices. Easy to set up with no tools required for installation.

Click here for more information about CTA Digital IP-AST Wireless Air Sound Transmitter