The home we own had a Savant system installed when we bought it. I had an integrator come out and work on it a couple of times and it worked fine after that but I’ve found the system to be generally unreliable. For instance it’s no longer controlling the volume of my receiver or my Tivo box. Also, the interface won’t load on my new phone, so I have to use an old device to control it. I’ve resisted the “opportunity” to upgrade the Savant to a newer system because it was always working just well enough to make the upgrade not worth it.
Frankly though, I’m tired of its unreliability and the lock in to having to call the guy every time it breaks or I want to change something. I’ve been doing research into HA and it seems to cover many of the things that I need just for the AV system. I will look into integrating my other Smart Home devices down the road as they’re lower priority and work fine now.
It looks pretty straightforward to control my Marantz receiver, amp, pre-amp, TiVO, AppleTV and Playstation 4. Those integrations look pretty easy. Where I’m getting hung up is on the music distribution system that’s currently installed. I have a SnapAV Episode 12-Channel box here. I can’t find any information on that being controlled by HA.
But I’m also wondering if I would need something to replace, what I believe is, the Savant audio matrix box. In Savant I have an option for multiple sources distributed to 6 zones. In fact, it has 4 sources from iTunes installed on the MacMini that runs Savant. Then I can also use an Echo Dot as a different input. It looks like it’s fairly easy to just install one source and then be able to choose the zones, but I’m a bit stumped on how I could use different sources output to different zones. I think that’s what my Savant SmartAudio box is doing and I realize that I won’t be able to control Savant Hardware with HA.
I plan on starting up the install on a spart RPI 3B and then, if I get it working properly, putting Linux onto the MacMini and switching over to that permanently.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.