Every time I’m at the gym, I see the sign hanging below the television sets “tune to 88.1” or “tune to 107.9” to get the audio. Meanwhile, at my favorite coffee shop, there are always world soccer matches on their TV, but never any audio.
Fortunately, it turns out that the Whole House FM Transmitter 3.0 does an admirable job of broadcasting audio to the coffee shop venue, but just those who want to tune in…
The world is going wireless. Odds are you have devices all around you that connect to each other through airwaves, whether it’s wifi signals, bluetooth or some proprietary system that lets game systems sport wireless controllers. For a one-to-one connection, bluetooth is splendid and I certainly have plenty of bluetooth earbuds, sports headsets and headphones in the office that work just fine. Indeed, the bluetooth Plantronics BackBeat Fit are my current headphones of choice at the gym.
But get to my favorite coffee shop in North Boulder and while the HDTV on the wall often has tennis, bicycling or soccer on, it’s extremely rare that there’s audio because, quite reasonably, it’s disruptive and annoying to people who aren’t interested in that specific sporting event. At the gym, however, there are multiple TVs on at any given time, each broadcasting its audio on a specified FM frequency. Brilliant!
A bit of research at the gym ascertained that they used FM transmitters, small boxes about the size of a deck of playing cards that hook up to the audio out of the television and make it simple for people to tune in to that specific frequency, whether on an FM radio or one of the many Android phones with built-in FM reception. A bit more research, a query letter, and I had a Whole House FM Transmitter 3.0 in my hands, ready to test.
These units are remarkably easy to set up, pretty much out of the box, though with four different ways to power the unit and at least as many wiring options for the inbound audio signal there is a bit of experimentation that’s required to get everything hooked up properly. The units are pretty slick looking too, kind of like a really high-tech walkie-talkie:
The top left connection is the antenna to help with its broadcast signal strength, the top right wire is the audio in connection, the wire on the left is the micro-USB power connection and the buttons along the front let you fine tune the frequency and usage parameters. Notice there are three preset frequencies (each of which you can adjust) to make it easy to have, say, multiple interchangeable units.
I plugged in the FM Transmitter to a wall plug in this situation, but you could just as easily have a couple of AA batteries or power it off the USB plug of a computer or audio/video component, as available. You can also power it with the (included) car power adapter, though I’m not exactly sure in what situation that’d be useful.
The biggest challenge is to figure out how to get the audio signal into the unit. If you’re lucky, the unit whose sound you want to broadcast has a headphone jack (like a computer, tablet or smartphone) and you can simply use the included splitter and audio jack to add the WHFMT3 (Whole House FM Transmitter 3.0. Get it?) to the system. If not, there are RCA plugs and a variety of other options included that make the unit quite versatile.
Once hooked up, it’s just a matter of ensuring that the transmitter and receiver — in this case an older iPod Touch that includes FM reception capabilities — are on the same frequency and you’re good to go:
That’s all I needed to do and I was able to walk about 40-50 feet away from the transmitter before I started to hear any degradation of signal, and another 20-30 before it cut out entirely. Not bad: 75 feet is a pretty long way!
For our final test, we laid the unit in front of the television:
Ya know what? It worked perfectly!
I won’t show you the terrifying snarl of wires and cables in the actual media closet that we ended up jamming the unit into, and I’m not convinced it won’t work better to restore it to its place in front of the television itself, but for now it’s hidden and all that’s left is for the café to make up signs telling people that they can now listen to the TV programming with their FM receiver. I know I’ll be doing so for as many soccer matches as they’ll broadcast.
Whole House FM Transmitter 3.0 from TAW-Global, MSRP $300, but $129.99 at Amazon.com.
Disclaimer: TAW-Global sent us a WHFMT3 for review purposes.