Long distance wireless speaker setup

[KoolAidKid]

I am looking to build a wireless speaker setup to control 6 speakers that are up to 400 meters away from the transmitter. The speakers will be placed in a line that extends away from the transmitter. Each speaker will be driven by its own self-powered amp. Basically I need a way to send the digital data from a PC to the speaker location and convert it to a line-level analog signal to be output to the amp.

I was thinking that I could accomplish this by setting up an adhoc 802.11b/g network with PC's at each of the speaker locations. Since the speakers are all in a line I could possibly use a unidirectional antenna to boost the range of the transmitter.

Any thoughts/suggestions on this problem? I know that there are products that take an analog input, digitize it, and send it to a receiver over the 2.4 GHz band, but I would rather do a single D-to-A conversion rather than D-to-A-to-D-to-A.

Of course, a nice side benefit of this is the removal of the wires for my surround speakers in my home theater setup.

 

[f95toli]

As long as you manage to use 802.11 over that distance I don't see any reason why it shouldn't work.
There are products that can do this for you (I saw a review in amagazine a few weeks ago, D-Link?) bit if you have a spare PC that might be cheaper.
Are you planning to use an external DA or just use the soundcard in the PC?

 

[KoolAidKid]

I am probably going to use the sound card for the DA conversion. I don't have a need for extremely high quality signals, but running 400 meters of speaker wire is mighty annoying, especially when the wire has to run through a swamp (long story). I was looking at some of those networking products (from D-Link, Linksys, and others) and I'm not sure that they will work for my application. I need the PC to push a signal to one speaker at a time. The media networking products seem to pull files from the PC. I need the transmitter to broadcast a digital stream to one of the six speakers while the other 5 are silent.

I imagine that this could be accomplished by putting a pc with a wireless card at each speaker and linking the PC's in a wireless network. The digital signal would be sent to one of the PCs on the network which would then do the DA conversion and output to the amp. I was hoping that there was some easier way to do this (some off-the-shelf product, perhaps), as I know very little about how to push data over a network.