Bluetooth signals have limited range. I searched for bluetooth range extender or boost bluetooth and came up with what seemed to be less than conclusive advice.

If you like playing music on your stereo and controlling it remotely, if your stereo has analog RCA input sockets (and most other than the cheapest do), the best though not the cheapest solution would be to use the Sonos system. Get a Sonos Connect box, that will attach to the stereo, and then you run free Sonos software on a PC (Win or Mac). You can control it from any kind of a device and the signal travels over Wifi.

Bluetooth is a near field communications protocol so you're not going to get much distance out of it. What kind of range are you looking for? You may look at an add on bluetooth receiver with antennas on it. You may get a few more yards out of it, but don't expect a dramatic increase.

Looks like Elmer replied before I could hit submit

:)

Thank you for the input, gentlemen. I have a Sonos adapter right now, plugged into my AUX. Sonos has informed me they will no longer support playing music stored on my iPad. They are pushing me to send my music to the cloud, or pay for some sort of streaming service. I have almost 4,000 songs in my iTunes library and dozens of play lists. I purchased an iPad with lots of storage to hold music I own. I refuse to now pay monthly for cloud storage or recreate all my play lists under another music service (I've got both Google and Prime). For many reasons, I enjoy owning music and taking it wherever I want regardless of whether or not I have internet access, or someday, not being able to afford to rent storage for my songs. It's why I've already paid for devices with enough storage.

But our primary usage is listening to music in our back yard that I control wirelessly on my iPad. Using the Bluetooth on our Rotel receiver, I can take the iPad about 10 feet out our back patio, which is about 20 feet from the receiver. I'd like to be able to take it twice that distance and through a wall. Seems that shouldn't be too much to ask. Pie in the sky would be to take it anywhere in the yard I want to be, which would be 100 feet or more. But I'll settle for just 40-60 feet if I must.

If I may vent for a moment: Me and hubby owned over 300 record albums when we met. Re-bought most of them in CD version in the 90's. Then copied most of them to iTunes around Y2K. I bought a PC and iPad that had enough storage to hold everything, a $400 Sonos device so I can control it all wirelessly from my patio, and now even that isn't apparently enough. I'm getting really effing sick of the music/electronics industry constantly changing formats and their incessant push to keep me paying to listen to stuff we already bought. This BS with Sonos not letting me play music on my own device is pushing me postal, if you know what I mean. Okay, soapbox moment over. :-) Suggestions appreciated!

Easy solution. Your music should be on a PC (internal or external storage device) with multiple backups on multiple devices.There's a setting in Sonos software to tell the system where your music can be found. Done. The ipad communicates with Sonos running on a PC over Wifi, not Bluetooth.

I just set up a Sonos system for a friend with 400 albums in lossless format (FLAC) last week, the music is on an external drive connected to a laptop. If you have Apple PC hardware, the equivalent file format is ALAC. Both maintain CD quality or better, sound much better than compressed, lossy MP3 or AAC (aka M4A). iTunes will rip CDs to lossless (Apple Lossless) format, it's a setting you need to adjust in Preferences.

I'm not sure what "copied to iTunes" means. iTunes is a program only, the music is stored somewhere and it shouldn't be on an iPad. Apple didn't always make music folders visible except under program control, maybe it does now. If yours are, there's no reason to move them, just tell Sonos the folder locations. Put them as sub folders under one branch of the drive folder tree to make access easy.

To put it in context, my digitized collection in round numbers is approx. 23000 tracks from 1800 albums. It's 70% lossless (FLAC) and takes up nearly 400 GB on an external drive. I have 5 backup copies, including one in a safe deposit box. Too many hours spent ripping CDs to lose it to the inevitable drive failure. This collection goes back nearly 20 years and has been added to regularly. I've had maybe 4 drive failures over this period and none were ever a problem because of redundant backups.

You have no need for a cloud account of any kind, in my opinion.

Thanks for the info. I do have my entire music library stored on the PC in my office, which runs nightly back-ups to a portable drive. I have, in the past, had the Sonos app on the PC and have played music off the PC (this was before I bought the iPad). I guess the link is, I'll need to figure out how to get my iPad to control the music on my PC. Not sure if that's possible given my PC runs on Windows.

I would still like to pursue getting a bluetooth that has a longer range and working it that way. I was happy with Sonos in the beginning, but in these last couple years, it's gotten buggy. I have to reset the unit frequently because it will start skipping through songs. They're constantly updating their software, causing me to have to sit and wait while the update runs. I was never able to get it to work with Google Music, and now these hoops they expect me to go through just to keep using their system. I'd rather find a more simple and direct way to play my music, if there is one.

Sonos provides apps for free download that run in the I world (iPads and iPhones) and also in the Android world (phones and tablets). They easily and effortlessly control the Sonos software running on either a Mac or Win PC. The apps work great!

I may be wrong but it seems like you're struggling to use the equipment in other than the normal way. There is no good reason to store and play music from an ipad when you have a PC available. To send the music across a distance and quality limited bluetooth connection instead of over Wifi also makes no sense. If this mode is how you experience music skipping, you've just identified the problem.

You're right, the music shouldn't be skipping, but I suspect the problem is other than the Sonos stuff. It's pretty rock solid and doesn't usually cause such problems. Think about these things:

-How old is your router? Is the signal from the PC to the router and separately from the router to your stereo strong? Do you experience music skipping when playing music stored on the PC? How about when using a streaming service like Pandora?

You can measure Wifi signal strength with a smartphone app like Wifi Analyzer.

-Are there many simultaneous users of your Wifi signal?

- While you have Wifi Analyzer active, how many Wifi signals from other homes do you see. Are you using a channel many others are? Try changing the channel to a less crowded portion of the spectrum (in 2.4, channels are 1-11)

-Is the router located near either the stereo or the PC such that you could run an ethernet wire and use that instead of a Wifi connection on that signal path?

-Is the PC you're using not too old, in good shape and with enough memory to run a few programs at once?

I think you should be able to easily resolve the performance issue by looking at the other components needed for the Sonos system to work. Another thing to do would be to uninstall the Sonos hardware and then re-install it, in case there's a problem. It really operates flawlessly in normal conditions.

Post back what you find, I'm willing to help you work through this. Good luck.

My primary use of Bluetooth is between my phone and either my car speakers or an external Beats speaker. When I'm streaming through my phone, the music goes to the speaker and I can place the speaker virtually anywhere in my home without losing the signal - maybe 40 feet.

I very much appreciate the help and advice. I've been trying to add the iTunes library on my PC to my Sonos app (this is the app from my PC not from the iPad). I keep getting the error shown in the photo even when I directly select the drive and path from the Browse. From an internet search, it seems it's related to my security. I've got Norton 360 Premiere and have checked the settings, all the permissions they mentioned are set to "Allow". Not sure where to go from here. :(

Just to be clear, the screen shot above is from the Sonos app on my PC where my iTunes library is. Obviously it's powered on, and I get this message regardless of which option (in the screen shot below) I choose. I first tried "My Music Folder". When that didn't work, I tried "Another folder or drive connected to my computer", selected "Browse" and selected the path to my iTunes Music. It runs through an "Indexing" for a while, then comes back with the message in the first screen shot above.

You said you have the music backed up on an external drive.

Try connecting the external drive to the PC and then pointing Sonos to the second choice in the image above, "Another folder or drive connected to my computer". At the risk of saying the obvious, point it to the highest point in your music folder tree so that all music-containing folders are included below it as sub-folders.

What happens?

I suspect that the bluetooth transmitter/receiver built into the Rotel receiver isn't very good. (I have two bluetooth speakers and one maintains its connection with my cellphone much better than the other as I walk around the house.) I'd buy a new bluetooth adapter/receiver, plug it into the AUX jack on the Rotel, and connect (via bluetooth) to that from the iPad. Here are a few you might want to check out:

• https://www.amazon.com/Logitech-980-000910-Bluetooth-Adapter-Streaming/dp/B00IQBSW28
• https://www.amazon.com/Etekcity-Wireless-Bluetooth-Receiver-NFC-Enabled/dp/B00KXYXXK2
• https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07D2C9K2X
• https://www.amazon.com/B06-Plus-Bluetooth-Receiver-Streaming/dp/B078J3GTRK

Read the reviews and find ones that mention having good range. They're all less than $30 so you really can't go wrong.

Note: bluetooth does not provide the highest-quality sound. When I connect my phone to a speaker with a cable instead of bluetooth, the sound quality is noticeably better.