New device fills house with music
Mike Himowitz

Published on May 1, 2003
© 2003- The Baltimore Sun

Like millions of PC users, I have a collection of digital music stored on a computer in the basement. That's a fine arrangement when I'm working, but useless if I want to relax in an easy chair and listen to those tunes on the stereo upstairs in the family room.

Not surprisingly, hardware manufacturers are rushing to fill this void with a variety of new gadgets. At the high end, they're introducing elaborate set-top boxes that act as multimedia servers for video and music on a home network. These are great if you want to go to the expense and trouble of setting them up.

If you don't have a champagne budget or a fancy network, you might look at X10's Lola, a wireless system that transmits digital music from a PC in one room to a sound system in another. Its advantage over similar gadgets: Lola displays song titles and playlists on a TV set and lets you pick your tunes with a remote control, a nice trick that makes the package a complete solution to the problem.

First things first - yes, Lola comes from X10.com, which produces those awful Internet popup ads with cheesy come-ons for Internet cameras and other gadgets.

Once you get past the cheesecake, though, X10 produces some interesting hardware. The Web site's parent company has been around for 25 years, making well-regarded remote control modules for lights and appliances. If you hate X10's ads so much that you don't want to patronize the company, I understand that. Otherwise, read on.

Like many wireless gadgets, Lola operates on the 2.4 gigahertz radio band, which also carries traffic from wireless computer networks, cordless phones and leaky microwave ovens. Lola doesn't require a network of any kind - it's a stand-alone system. Nor did it interfere with the wireless network in our house. Just realize that cross talk can be a problem.

X10 offers a wired Lola for $50, but if your computer and stereo are situated close enough to accommodate it, there's no need to buy it - running audio cables from your computer to the stereo will do the same job.

The two wireless Lola packages are far more useful. A $70 version is designed for computers with TV-out ports that deliver a composite or S-video signal to a VCR or television. But most buyers will need the $100 package, which works with the VGA video adapters standard on most computers.

I tried the VGA package - a daunting collection of hardware that includes a receiver, a transmitter, three sets of cables, two black power cubes and one of the meanest remote controls I've seen - a silver monster with 44 buttons in seven colors and a mini-joystick.

With Lola, X10 has tried to improve on its reputation for geeky instruction manuals by including an illustrated, quick-setup guide. Unfortunately, it wasn't entirely accurate, which created some confusion before I got everything hooked up.

On the computer side, that meant three sets of cables: one to split the video signal from the computer's VGA port between the monitor and the X10 transmitter; another from the output jack of the sound card to audio jacks on the transmitter, and a third from the transmitter to a USB port on my computer. Altogether, an impressive jumble of wires.

In our rec room, I ran one cable from the receiver to the video input jack of a TV set, and another pair to the left and right auxiliary jacks of my son's stereo. If your television is more than a few feet from your sound system, you may have to buy a longer video cable.

That done, I downloaded the Lola software from X10's Web site (there's no CD) and installed it on my computer. The package includes a driver for the X10 transmitter, a music file manager for the PC and the Lola player software.

The file manager automatically scanned my hard drive for MP3 music files and did its best to sort them by author, title, album and genre, using the "metadata" stored invisibly in each file, as well as Web-based data sources. It guessed right about 60 percent of the time, which left a lot of cleanup work.

The file manager is neither intuitive nor or easy to use, particularly in setting up playlists that mix songs from different albums and artists. But I got the hang of it after a while.

The Lola player is intriguing because it's designed to be readable on both a PC screen and a TV. This isn't easy, given the difference in scan rates, resolution and color displays. But when everything is working, you can control Lola either with a mouse at the computer or with the remote control at the TV-stereo end.

Surprisingly, everything worked the first time - sort of. The Lola software running on my computer also appeared on the TV screen, while the remote's dedicated buttons and joystick let me pick songs by playlist, artist, genre, album and title. With a few tweaks to make navigation easier, Lola would be a very slick program - as things stand, it's quite serviceable.

In addition to controlling Lola, the remote will handle a TV, cable box and any X10 lamp or appliance controller.

Unfortunately, Lola's sound quality was marred by pops, crackles and hissing. After experimenting with the four available radio channels and repeatedly tweaking the flip-and-swivel antennas on the receiver and transmitter, I finally got acceptable sound from one speaker, but almost nothing from the other.

An hour of swapping cables convinced me this was an X10 hardware problem, and I called the company. It shipped another unit, and sure enough, when I replaced the receiver, both speakers produced strong audio.

Looking back, setting up Lola took more than a little twiddling. But much of it is unavoidable - if you want computer software to play songs on a TV and stereo in another room, you have to hook stuff up.

That caveat aside, Lola performed as advertised. I can now play MP3 music files on a stereo in the family room and select songs without a trip to the PC in the basement. If you want to extend digital music to the rest of the house, it's useful gadget at a reasonable price.

Information: 800-675-3044 or www.x10.com