I want to host a private rave at a pond.
There are other residents of the pond. In order to be a good neighbor, I want to do it silent disco style, which means instead of playing music from speakers for the whole pond to hear, each listener will have their own pair of headphones.
So, I am looking for recommendations on a product I can use or modify to solve a few issues this scenario presents:
The listening devices need to work even while listeners are swimming. This means they need to be waterproof and hard to lose. They should either firmly attach to the listener's head, or for ear buds, they should have the ability to connect with a string that can be attached to a headband or armband floatie or something.
The playback devices should be able to play for around 3 hours on a single charge. The rave probably won't last longer than that.
All listening devices need to play music in sync, plus or minus a few milliseconds. I am planning for somewhere between 7 and 20 listeners, and I want them all to be able to dance to the same music. I don't need a second simultaneous music channel like you sometimes see at silent discos.
Ideally, a DJ could broadcast to all listening devices in real time. I don't have a sense of how hard it would be to set something up that will work in both air and water over a certain range. The pond is a mile or two in circumference, but swimmers will likely stay within a much smaller lit swim area, maybe a few dozen feet from shore. If a broadcast solution is feasible, I would like for it to cover maybe a hundred feet. I know a lot of headphones support bluetooth, but my experience with bluetooth suggests it would perform poorly in this situation because: it is usually 1:1 for broadcaster-receiver, when I need 1:many, and it's range is usually low and strongly reduced by obstructions (like water might be?). So perhaps some other mechanism would be more appropriate, like maybe radio?
If a broadcast solution is too complicated or expensive, perhaps it would be more feasible to set up a pre-recorded playlist. Then we could pair each listening device with a playback device preloaded with the playlist, and we could somehow configure it such that playback is synchronized based on time. Maybe I could put an arduino or something in a waterproof container and use it as the playback device.
I don't have a huge budget for this, so I am interested in ways I can compromise on price while still achieving something fun.
