Linksys Wireless - G Music Bridge

We’re all looking for ways to enhance our normal living experience right? Since we’re labor-saving and entertainment devices are prevalent in every household I’m sure a major problem we face with the “enhanced living” scenario is wiring. But no worries people, we have plenty of options out there that are quite capable of eradicating the said problem. Wi-Fi is the way to go boys and girls, so break out the trumpets and boom boxes for here comes Linksys’ latest development the Wireless – G Music Bridge.

Design
What would you expect this to look like? I mean really. But let me tell you anyways. It’s small lightweight and rectangular. It has an antenna on the right and… well that’s it really. The three indicators located in the front are for the power, Ethernet and Wi-Fi signal connectivity.

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At the rear you’ll find the connections for – Audio (stereo obviously - RCA), 3.5mm line out, coaxial out and optical out. Then of course there’s the Ethernet slot and adapter port (12VDC 500mA). Between them is tiny reset button that can be accessed using a pin.

Taking the Bridge
Let me explain how the Music Bridge works. In the simplest of terms, the bridge is connected to an Amplifier via RCA (from the audio out) or you also have the option of using the Line out. So you’re wire would need to be a single 3.5 mm to RCA cable. The opposite ends would go into any of the amp channels.

So basically what the Bridge does is send signals to your Wi-Fi router or any other supported devices and you can comfortably listen to music on your PC or Laptop that’s playing on your amp. Look Ma, no wires!
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Installation & Performance
The Music Bridge despite being a Linksys product was quite a pain to configure. It’s not exactly rocket science to configure a device for Wi-Fi connectivity but getting the Music Bridge to work with our Wi-Fi test lab setup, it certainly seemed so. For starters, despite our best effort it refused to detect our 802.11g network. It took a lot of fiddling around, not to mention changing the network to WEP security, before we were able to get the music bridge to acknowledge the network. Finally when it did we started checking out the Music Bridge’s audio playback capabilities. This test lasted for all of 10 minutes before the music bridge lost the connection to Wi-Fi. No amount of coaxing or resetting the router would allow it to detect the network. Darn it!

Having never faced a problem like this in the past with Linksys products, we decided to check out their support website to solve the problem. It was no big surprise to discover an updated firmware was available. One upgrade later and we were all set to retry our little experiment. This time the whole experience was way smoother. Not only did the music bridge easily find our network, it was able to connect to it using WPA.

Despite the limited bandwidth Wi-Fi offers, the music bridge was up to the task and did not drop the audio stream even once. To test the distance the music bridge was capable of, we moved the bridge to the farthest point in the lab and into the next room… the audio playback remained smooth and suffered no lag.

Conclusion
The bottom line - The Music Bridge at the end of the day is a specialty product. It is expensive at around Rs. 5,905 and requires some basic knowledge of networking to get it functional. However, if you are experienced in setting up a Wi-Fi network, and willing to shell out dough like this for wireless freedom, look no further.