Sitecom Wireless Audio Transmitter review

It's the kind of peripheral that seems useless until you need it. The main idea behind Sitecom's Wireless Audio Transmitter is that rather than dragging external speakers around with your laptop, you leave them in one place attached to a wireless audio receiver, and the laptop is encumbered only by a USB audio transmitter dongle.

If you want to the freedom to move between the armchair and the sofa but still get decent sound it starts to look attractive. It could potentially be useful for a desktop PC setup if your amplifier is on the other side of the room, too.

The package consists of a thumb-drive sized transmitter dongle at one end and a small receiver box sporting analogue audio outputs at the other. It's pleasingly simple to set up, with no need for drivers under Windows XP, Vista or Mac OS X. Plug the dongle in and it's identified as a generic audio device. Driver installation is automatic, and all you then need to do is press the wireless-pairing buttons on transmitter and receiver.

The receiver gets its power via a mini-USB connector. It does come with a mains adaptor terminated in a USB plug, but we saved a mains socket by plugging in to an actual USB port on a living-room media-centre PC with no problems. A couple of standard analogue phono outputs connect to the speakers or amplifier.

Aside from the fact the omission of a digital output the only irritation is there's just a stereo phono-to-3.5mm jack provided in the box; for connection to a hi-fi amp you'll need to dig out a standard phono-to-phono cable.

As far as the wireless link is concerned, we had no problems at all with signal strength when the transmitter was in the same room as the receiver. For the record, we also took a laptop around the house, the audio connection showing no discernible deterioration until we were several rooms away.

The system transmits audio in lossless 44.1kHz, 16-bit format (the same quality as an audio CD), and while hi-fi snobs might find fault with the quality, for most listeners it will be more than acceptable. Feed it into even the shoddiest external speakers and it'll certainly beat integrated laptop audio.

It's not what you'd class a must-have device for every household, but if you need what it does, the Wireless Audio Transmitter does it well. Better still, it does it for a fair price.

Author: David Fearon