I recently purchased a W3 wireless audio transmitter from Audio Engine Usa for a buddy of mine. He wanted to be able to be able to control his I tunes library on his laptop while sitting by the fire pit at his camp. I told him about the Audio Engine setup a little while ago and he inquired about it for the up coming July 4th holiday.
I went ahead and ordered the W3 system, which consists of 2 USB dongles, a 120V power adapter for one of the dongles, and some cables to convert from a 3.5 output jack to RCA, etc. One dongle is a transmitter/sender unit and the second one is a receiver. So, before I turn this over to him I am trying it out at home. I am currently sitting in my reclliner, streaming Pandora wirelessly to my rig while typing on this forum on my son's netbook.
Setup is fairly simple, I plugged the 120V USB power adapter into the back of my C-16 and ran the output cables to my Aux input. Then I plugged the transmitter directly into the USB port on the netbook. CPU found the hardware right away, recognized it as an Audio Engine W3 and bam, I was all set to listen to music. I do have to say, the music coming from the setup doesn't sound bad at all. The output from the system doesn't sound like a shitty sound card is pushing heaviliy compressed audio. (Not sure how to describe a computer sounding output.) W
Anyhow, so far this thing rocks. Only $149 shipped. You can also add additional receivers to the setup. They cost an additional $89 each. I think you can add up to 3 total recievers from 1 transmitter. Pretty cool. I had a little problem after I registered (mistyped my email address), so I wasn't getting correspondence like the website said I would, but I emailed support (late at night) and got a response first thing the next morning. Very helpful people. Good customer support. Definitely see me buying one of these down the road.
Let me know if any of you have used the earlier version, the W1, or if any have the W3 like I do. I'd be interested in getting someone elses opinion, and also to see how it performs over time.
Neil
