Pandora in Your Garage

I know I’ve mentioned Pandora before but here is my trick to pipe internet radio music into my garage without carrying my laptop out there.

Like many people, I had an old stereo receiver that was gathering dust. It is now set up in the garage and I sometimes listen to FM stations (less and less), or plug my iPod in and listen to podcasts or music while working on some project. I think I bought this receiver, around 1978 and it only puts out about 25 watts per channel but it still works perfectly and is ideal for the garage.

Here is how to hook up Pandora between your computer and a stereo amp somewhere else in the house.

I recommend using a length of cat5 Ethernet cable (cat3 phone cable would also work) and measure it out to go from your computer to your stereo amp, wherever that happens to be. Obviously you want to avoid running it over hot water pipes or places where it can get damaged. My cable is about 35 feet long to go from my upstairs office down to the garage below. There may be a limit to how long you can make this cable, but I haven’t noticed any signal degradation at 35ft.

Next get one of those short cables that you use to feed your ipod into a standard stereo amp. It has a mini stereo plug on one end like the one on your iPod earbuds, and a pair of RCA plugs on the other end. If you’re like me, you probably have half a dozen of these sitting in a box somewhere. If not, you can get one at Radio Shack for a couple bucks.

Cut this cable in the center and strip the wires carefully back. These are shielded wires so the left and right channel will each have a shield wire and a center conductor. They are very tiny so use care to keep as many strands of the tiny wire in play.

Strip the Ethernet cable and pick 2 pairs of wires, any two will do but they must be a twisted pair (i.e. green and white green, brown and white brown, etc).
Solder the two sections of the audio cable to the ends of the Ethernet cable. Pay attention to the colors and polarity so that both ends of the audio cable are spliced correctly using the Ethernet cable. Tape up the ends. Note: just twisting the wires together may work for a while but you will wish you soldered them before long, trust me.

Now, just plug the cable into the headphone output of your computer audio card and the other end into the AUX input of your stereo. You should initially keep the volume turned down on the amp in case the signal from the computer is too strong. I would not recommend plugging this signal into the phono input of your old amplifier. That one is designed for very small signals and may get overloaded. If you already plug your iPod into the AUX input, you can use the tape input like I do as an alternative and flip the tape monitor switch when you want to listen to Pandora.

As I mentioned, the other thing you can do with this setup is to play the music stored on your PC, such as your iTunes library into the garage and just play music from that instead of using the iPod. This concept can also be used to distribute music all over your house if you are so inclined.

In conclusion, I recommend to friends to send Pandora the $36 for a full year of unlimited music without ads and 5 hours of unattended listening. The sound quality is better as well. Pandora is one of those amazingly cool free services that I love so much that I consider the fee more of a donation like you would do for PBS. They deserve it.