Patent ID: 8571544

Claim:
A system comprising: a digital audio player comprising an audio jack; an earphone set comprising a pair of earphones configured to be worn simultaneously by a user; a wireless network adapter external to the digital audio player and comprising a connecter that plugs into the audio jack of the digital audio player, wherein the wireless network adapter is for encoding analog audio received from the digital audio player via the audio jack into digital format and wirelessly transmitting the digitally-formatted audio to the earphone set; and a streaming digital audio content server that is connected to the Internet; wherein each earphone in the pair of earphones comprises: a transceiver that is for: receiving digitally-formatted audio, in a first mode, from the streaming digital audio content server via an infrastructure wireless network and, in a second mode, from the wireless network adapter via an ad hoc wireless network; and converting the received digitally-formatted audio to analog audio signals; and at least one acoustic transducer connected to the transceiver, wherein the at least one acoustic transducer is for outputting the analog audio signals.