Thursday, May 23, 2013

Miccus Home RTX Long Range Bluetooth Transmitter

I'm pretty impressed with this little device.

I've been looking at a Bluetooth transmitter that could plug into a HTPC and send the signal to an amp in another part of the house.

The idea behind this is that you could control the media (music mainly) being played back from the Win7 HTPC from an Android Smartphone using MediaCenter Control over WiFi  from anywhere in your house and have it pump out a proper stereo.

To achieve this I first off used a Creative BT-D1 Bluetooth transmitter with a Logitech bluetooth receiver.

I opted for a more expensive transmitter (there's heaps of $10 jobs on eBay) as I figured it would be better quality.

How very wrong I was.

The Creative transmitter was totally piss-ant in terms of transmission power.

To boot, there was no software available to actually control which device it pairs with from Creative.

I thought the Windows Bluetooth controls might magically appear as well but I'm guessing this thing isn't compliant with what Win 7 considers a "real" bluetooth device. 

It supports some creative crap called apt-X which I'm sure is of use to someone.
If this is you, go over to eBay and you will be able to find a bargain shortly...

Anyway, after being bitterly disappointed with the Creative rip-job, I did some proper research.

I needed a bluetooth trasmitter that wasn't crap and could actually send the RF signal more than 10 metres.

This led me to look at the Miccus Home RTX which claimed transmit distances of up to 45 metres.

I took a gamble and ordered it from the only place I could see it for sale (eBay) after seeing generally positive (but not very specific) user feedback on the device.

Well the little thing just arrived and I can happily report that it works as described.




I set this bad boy up at the complete opposite end of my house and paired it up with the Logitech receiver and away it went.

Note in the picture that it actually has an external omni-directional antenna.
Win.

Perfect quality audio and super simple to setup.

At $60 it's not the cheapest thing in the world but it's not a deal breaker price either.

I'm so very glad this device exists and I definitely recommend it for anyone in a similar situation.

Cheers.

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