Hello, all, I'm not sure I'm posting this in the right group but I did
some searching and this seems to be the best forum for this type of
question.

What I want to do, and seem to lack the correct terms to define it as
my Internet searches didn't yield useful results, is to take an audio
feed from one source and use it in a different building about 50 feet
away.

To be more detailed, I have DirecTV with XM Radio in my house and I
want to be able to listen to that in my shop building about 50 feet
from my house. In my house I have the DirecTV receiver plumbed into a
Sony head unit that has a variety of outputs, including a headphone
jack. In my shop I have a crappy old something stereo that has, at
least, an RCA-style input for auxilliary sources and, of course, a FM
receiver.

What I've done to listen to this outdoors (when VERY close to the part
of the house with the Sony head unit) is to plumb a Belkin FM
transmitter into the headphone output of the Sony and then put a
regular FM radio outside the house as close as possible to the Belkin
which is indoors. This is barely tolerable as even small distances
are too great for the signal output of the Belkin. 50 feet to the
shop is impossible.

I can run a physical cable to the shop from the house if that is what
is best. I could build a stronger FM transmitter than what the Belkin
is, to heck with the FCC (I'm in a rural area), but I'm not an
electronics master; building a FM transmitter would be a first for me
and I'd not know how to interface it with the output from, say, the
headphone jack on the Sony head unit. If I had a schematic I could
follow it and build it, but I haven't found any such thing so far.

There should be a simple way of just bridging a gap between two stereo
units, one as source, one as receiver, but I cannot think of one other
than running a cable from the headphone jack of the Sony to the
whatever stereo in the shop but I'm pretty sure the attenuation of
over 50 feet of cable would be murder. I may be using a technical
term out of place, I mean the loss over the wire would be very large.

Thank you for your help and time.

--HC

HC wrote:
(snip)
> There should be a simple way of just bridging a gap between two stereo
> units, one as source, one as receiver, but I cannot think of one other
> than running a cable from the headphone jack of the Sony to the
> whatever stereo in the shop but I'm pretty sure the attenuation of
> over 50 feet of cable would be murder. I may be using a technical
> term out of place, I mean the loss over the wire would be very large.

Running a remote speaker 50 feet is no problem, as long as
you use reasonably heavy wire. Say, 18 AWG. Running a
headphone signal to a line in jack would have very little
attenuation even with very thin wire, because, unlike a
speaker, the line jack draws almost no current. It would be
something like a telephone signal, and they send those a lot
further than 50 feet.

On Aug 14, 9:38 pm, John Popelish <jpopel...@rica.net> wrote:
> HC wrote:
>
> (snip)
>
> > There should be a simple way of just bridging a gap between two stereo
> > units, one as source, one as receiver, but I cannot think of one other
> > than running a cable from the headphone jack of the Sony to the
> > whatever stereo in the shop but I'm pretty sure the attenuation of
> > over 50 feet of cable would be murder. I may be using a technical
> > term out of place, I mean the loss over the wire would be very large.
>
> Running aremotespeaker 50 feet is no problem, as long as
> you use reasonably heavy wire. Say, 18 AWG. Running a
> headphone signal to a line in jack would have very little
> attenuation even with very thin wire, because, unlike a
> speaker, the line jack draws almost no current. It would be
> something like a telephone signal, and they send those a lot
> further than 50 feet.

Hey, Joh, thank you for your suggestion. I just ran a wire about 75
feet long (to have a little extra for overhead installation and stuff)
to the shop. It's something 22 gauge, but it's what I had a spool
of. I'm not sure what it's for, I bought it from our local
electronics store years ago for a project I don't remember and it's
processed, re-spooled stuff. It's 4 conductor plus ground with
shielding. I tied the black, the green, and the ground together for
the ground, then used the red and white for right and left channels,
respectively. I cut a Y cable that has the 4 (or is it 4.5?) mm
standard (small, not the 1/4 inch size) headphone jack (male) on one
end and left and right RCA males on the other, into two pieces,
headphone jack at one end, RCA's at the other. I spliced my 22 gauge
wire in between the two pieces I cut up and ran it from the head unit
headphone jack in the house to the aux input RCA on the stereo in the
shop. No problem, works great. Maybe a little tinny sounding (like
it's lost some bass) but then that could be me just being
hypersensitive to any potential problem and I may be making that up in
my mind. Regardless, it works and it works well enough for me.

Thank you.

--HC

HC wrote:
> On Aug 14, 9:38 pm, John Popelish <jpopel...@rica.net> wrote:
>> HC wrote:
>>
>> (snip)
>...No problem, works great. Maybe a little tinny sounding (like
> it's lost some bass) but then that could be me just being
> hypersensitive to any potential problem and I may be making that up in
> my mind. Regardless, it works and it works well enough for me.

I suspect you are hearing the difference between two
different sets of speakers and two different sets of room
resonances.