Multi-Room Audio Platforms

Lounge
#21

I mean there really isn’t anything more for me to go on because Sonos is notoriously stingy with the details, especially when it comes to specs, which I think they have said was so that people don’t “unfairly” compare their products to their competitors, which I think you can guess what I think about that.

Take for instance that S2 compatibility page you posted, great it says which products are not compatible, but does not actually tell you how to identify them. It only says well, check our app it’ll tell you if you are affected, but that doesn’t really help me who is looking at this from more of a theoretical and case-study perspective.

#22

Where? Where’s a hint?

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#23

I literally just got an image of a dog when the doorbell rings :rofl:

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#24

Perfect! That’s what I was thinking of when I wrote it. :grinning:

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#25

Oh one other thing that I just remembered that Sonos is still better at is the Alexa integration, it is basically as seamless as anyone could want. There is MusicCast support for Alexa, but it is ehh at best, it does not support the speaker device type and as such does not duck the volume when a wake word is heard and does not play music directly to the speaker when part of the same group. You can get music to play to MusicCast via Alexa, but IME it only works like 30% of the time, and seems to be highly dependent upon whether or not Alexa thinks the “scene” is active.

#26

Seems general opinion is sonos is the way to go. I’m going tonhave to grab one of the ikeas. Give it a shake down.

#27

The microphones on the Beam are amazing. I could have a loud tv show playing and once I say alexa it lowers the volumes and answers. I’m always surprised when it hears me.

#28

It really depends on what your goals are, Sonos is a no-fuss system for mainly background music, imo, that is a bit more expensive than the competition up front and more expensive for any additions. You get rid of that no-fuss requirement and the price of competitors goes significantly down, especially with Alexa.

I think it definitely has it’s place for a certain subset of people, but it also has plenty of faults to contend with that, imo, most people seem to just gloss over because it looks pretty and works OOB.

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#29

Confession time. I’ve a ridiculous number of evho devices in my house. Including a few still new in the box.

While I’m not an audiophile I was wanting to get some speakers with higher quality sound.

#30

I have heard, well not heard personally but you get what I mean, I have heard that the gen 4 echo devices sound really good now. The reason I suggested alexa was purely because of the 3.5mm audio out jack, which you can pair with really any speaker setup. I personally have an echo flex using some old logitech computer speakers and an echo dot with a Klipsch Promedia 2.1 set from Costco, which in my testing is as good if not better than a stereo pair of Sonos Play:1 speakers, for less than half the price.

#31

I just brought the Sono’s arc and two of the SL and sub and my tv has never sound better. It hard to beat the Sono’s brand of speaker at least for me. I had a set of Klipsch and gave them to my grandson.

#32

I bought a new house that has a multi zone whole house speaker system. I added a serial port controlled matrix switch and multizone amp.

I use a pi running node red to control the matrix that gets setup messages over matter. My primary node red controls all the tts and music controls to set all of the different speaker zones. It is still a work in progress, but the foundation is there.

1 Like
#33

That sounds super interesting, if the zone linking is done DIY, how is the source controlled or can you only have 1 source at a time?

#34

I bought a used shinybow 8x8 matrix switcher that allows any of 8 inputs to connected to any/all outputs

2 Likes
#35

The fun part was getting my Chromecast to play from my has random music using node red

#36

So I recently tried out the multiroom audio feature for Alexa and first impressions are pretty good.

It definitely does not have the UX or user friendliness of Sonos, MusicCast, or Heos with quick linking and unlinking, and setting up a group is kinda slow, but once you have the group it is pretty solid. I think they are more going for a few static/permanent groups rather than the more dynamic model of Sonos, which I guess is fine, but I think I prefer the Sonos type model.

The audio sync was perfectly acceptable and not noticeably different compared to my Sonos setup in the same rooms.

One downside, and this may be just be due to limited testing, is that there was no easy way to control the individual volumes inside a group and all I could control is group volume as a whole.

So functionally it all seems to be there; pair that with the 3.5mm jacks on devices from as low as $9 new makes Alexa a serious budget/DIY multiroom audio competitor as long as you are fine with the whole smart speaker part, but even if you aren’t you can just mute the mics.

Side Note: Supposedly users have issues linking speakers on different BSSID’s which I did not experience any issue with despite have a 3 unit Orbi system with wireless backhaul. I wonder if this BSSID issue is the same issue that plagues MusicCast and Heos but doesn’t affect Sonos due to Sonos broadcasting it’s own network.

#37