Sonos Replacement

[AC43]

GravelBen said:

paulrockliffe said:

Google solved this with the Chromecast Audio nearly a decade ago. Streaming from anything, digital audio, groups or not, pipe the music into any amp. At £20 they were miles better than Sonos when the Sonos stuff worked and was supported.

IIRC I had trouble getting my CC Audio to stream from non-android devices, it took a lot of messing around to be able to play from a media player on a Windows PC straight to CC Audio (which I wanted to do at the time). I eventually got it to work with BubbleUPNP and Foobar, but it caused some headaches.

Easier to set up a media server on the PC as a NAS and then use an android phone to control the Chromecast.

My use of CC is simpler; Spotify Premium with audio quality set to max.

I just bought a third new/old stock spare. That, along with the two I've got in daily use, should cover me for the forseeable future.

[Roundm]

if you want to do this on the cheap - look up the Logitec Media Server (LMS) project. I've set that up for my stepfather to play anything from anything to anything (he has some single speaker setups in a study and in the kitchen, and Meridian stereo gear in the lounge) and we even stream from the radio on the meridian kit to the single speakers in the other rooms. The server is a raspberry pi with some storage in the USB port, the playback devices are pi's with amps or a DAC or SPDIF outputs (many are HifiBerry boards - but others are available with varying specs and capabilities, and something list piCorePlayer as a prebuilt sw image)

or if you want to go to town - I have Roon installed with a backend NAS system with FLAC versions of all my CD's. That plays to stereo in the bedroom, a single speaker in the dinning room, a spare Meridian DSP5000C (run as mono) in my office, an analogue stereo system ( a decent amp and a pair of TDL RTL3's in the snug) and a Meridian 5.1 system (5 DSP5000's and a REL Stadium III) in the multimedia room. Most of the streaming is through devices built on raspberry pi's (same hardware as the LMS mentioned above - but Iused either HiFiBerryOS or Ropiee as the SW build) with either an amp, a DAC or a straight SPDIF add on). I get bit perfect playback everywhere, can sync all the playback to it's seamless across the whole house. The cheapest speaker was less than £150 (and sounds better than any of the Sonos stuff) and the setup is well able to make the most of the 5.1 system as well. Roon includes some very high end capabilities

forgot to add, both can be used for whole home hifi - both support streaming services like Tidal (Roon doesn't support Spotify as Spotify recordings are not high quality enough), Roon also has a whole raft of digital transformation (DSP) capabilities including room correction, stuff like MQA and bitrate conversion to support whatever you want to do.

Edited by Roundm on Friday 31st March 23:50

[beanoir78]

Roundm said:

if you want to do this on the cheap - look up the Logitec Media Server (LMS) project. I've set that up for my stepfather to play anything from anything to anything (he has some single speaker setups in a study and in the kitchen, and Meridian stereo gear in the lounge) and we even stream from the radio on the meridian kit to the single speakers in the other rooms. The server is a raspberry pi with some storage in the USB port, the playback devices are pi's with amps or a DAC or SPDIF outputs (many are HifiBerry boards - but others are available with varying specs and capabilities, and something list piCorePlayer as a prebuilt sw image)

or if you want to go to town - I have Roon installed with a backend NAS system with FLAC versions of all my CD's. That plays to stereo in the bedroom, a single speaker in the dinning room, a spare Meridian DSP5000C (run as mono) in my office, an analogue stereo system ( a decent amp and a pair of TDL RTL3's in the snug) and a Meridian 5.1 system (5 DSP5000's and a REL Stadium III) in the multimedia room. Most of the streaming is through devices built on raspberry pi's (same hardware as the LMS mentioned above - but Iused either HiFiBerryOS or Ropiee as the SW build) with either an amp, a DAC or a straight SPDIF add on). I get bit perfect playback everywhere, can sync all the playback to it's seamless across the whole house. The cheapest speaker was less than £150 (and sounds better than any of the Sonos stuff) and the setup is well able to make the most of the 5.1 system as well. Roon includes some very high end capabilities

forgot to add, both can be used for whole home hifi - both support streaming services like Tidal (Roon doesn't support Spotify as Spotify recordings are not high quality enough), Roon also has a whole raft of digital transformation (DSP) capabilities including room correction, stuff like MQA and bitrate conversion to support whatever you want to do.

Edited by Roundm on Friday 31st March 23:50

I’ve never worked out how to access the room correction stuff on Roon. I might have to do a bit more googling on that, keep meaning to give it a go..

[Roundm]

TBH the only room correction I've played with is the meridian stuff and I think my room is too compromised to be a real listening room - it's our lounge and the hifi is arranged with the furniture - and I bought a calibrated microphone for that and am not sure there is much difference.

For the rest of the systems I used Roon to do things like create a mono signal for the rooms with a single speaker and make sure I supply the highest bitrate that is usable by the endpoint (so the Meridian gear gets 24/96, some of the others get 16/44) and to do any of the manipulation at the highest resolution I can