Electronics -- New Audio System Sounds Like Winner

Want to save a marriage? Improve relations with your party-wall neighbors? Keep peace with the kids? Lessen the drudgery of household chores and exercise? Save yourself a pile of money?

Few electronics products hold the promise of Recoton's Room Service wireless sound-distributing equipment. Best represented with its W200 wireless stereo headphone system ($130), the gear lets you listen to a stereo or TV audio track anywhere within your home - with no wires attached and no sonic interruptus.

The W200 system consists of a paperback book-sized audio transmitter, a small receiver and a pair of decent lightweight headphones. Supplied with all necessary accessories except three AA batteries, the package can literally be up and running in five minutes.

So now you can vacuum down the stairs and still keep up on the soaps, listen (and watch) in bed without disturbing a sleeping mate or the neighbors, enjoy radio, tape or CD music while someone else is watching TV in the same room, even take your sonic pleasures outdoors to the back yard.

First, take out the AC-powered base station/transmitter. Screw on its antenna and run a pair of wires to your sound source - either to audio output jacks of a stereo or TV receiver or else to the headphone jack of any ol' sound-maker. Just a little fussing with the volume knob on the back of the base unit optimizes the source signal, so transmissions will can be as loud as possible without distortion. (You want the LED indicator to flicker occasionally, not stay on constantly.)

Then, plug the supplied headphones into the beeper-sized receiver, which clips to a belt or slips into a pocket. Click on the battery power, fine-tune the receiver, set the volume level to taste . . . and enjoy.

Like the latest and much-improved breed of cordless telephones, Room Service products take advantage of 900 Mhz radio transmission space recently allocated for consumer products by the Federal Communications Commission. These frequencies are much cleaner and more robust than the 49 Mhz territory previously assigned for in-home transmission products, so performance can now approaches true high-fidelity quality with decent stereo separation and solid bass response.

Room Service's audio reproduction is a mite soft in the high frequency range but at least is hiss-free, unlike the wireless systems from Sony, Koss, Beyer and AKG that rely on infrared light signals. And unlike "line of sight" infrared beams, which can't bend around corners and which cut out if someone walks through the light path, these 900 mhz radio transmissions blast through plaster, copper and brick, as well as skin and bones.

With my base station hooked up to the living room TV, I could comfortably carry the headphone audio portion of the show into the kitchen, upstairs to bed and bathrooms, downstairs to the basement, even out the back door (slammed behind me) and into the garden. Though Recoton claims a maximum 100-foot range, in practice the system carries more like 150 feet, automatically flipping from stereo to monaural at the reception fringes.

Other Recoton Room Service models have the receiver section built into larger headphones (the W500 with rechargeable batteries) or hiding inside powered speakers (the W400).

I prefer the W200 system because of its flexibility. If you don't relish the headphones supplied with this package, you can plug in your own. Likewise, any powered speakers (widely available from Bose, Sony, Aiwa, Acoustic Research, Kenwood, etc.) can be connected to the Room Service W200 receiver, to create a very nice secondary listening-room situation.

In fact, multiple Room Service receivers can be purchased (at $50 each) and tuned to the same transmitter, for satellite listening in several indoor/outdoor locales simultaneously.