ESPHome I²S Audio Media Player Sound Quality

ESPHome
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1

I want to setup a media player using the I²S Audio Component for ESPHome, but I am a bit unclear on details of what is possible.
There isn’t really anything mentioned about what bitrate/sampling frequency can be used. I would like to send CD quality audio to this device, and have it play on some powered bookshelf speakers. In terms of what is possible, does it come down to the DAC being used, the ESP hardware, or both?
I was considering either a UDA1334A or PCM5102 external DAC, as I just need line level audio for my speakers.
Will a ESP-WROOM-32 be able to handle this? Any other recommendations?

2

Personally I would run squeezelite and forget esphome, but that’s me, not everyone will agree.

You’ll get compatibility with music assistant too.

3

Multi-room audio sync sounds very neat, but otherwise, I like the simplicity of ESPHome, as I don’t need to run an LMS server to use that. Also, it seems like squeezelite does not support much ESP hardware:
(For the sake of clarity, WROOM modules DO NOT work as they don’t include PSRAM. Some designs might add it externally, but it’s (very) unlikely.)

4

I second this route, but do wish that it could also be used for the voice recognition stuff as I have a bunch of them around my house.

5

What devices are you running squeezelite on?

6

Thirding ditching ESPHome for audio; I used it for a while primarily as a way to play alerts/sound effects and had a lot of issues. It was finicky about bitrates and would rather frequently be choppy. Ended up going the squeezelite route on a tablet with Music Assistant (was already using the tablet, so no need to try out ESP options).

Not sure if my issues could have been troubleshooted away (I didn’t put THAT much effort into it). But for actually listening to music, I wouldn’t waste my time on ESPHome when there’s so many other options that work really well for cheap.

7

I have a bunch of ESP32 wrover boards connected to speakers in the different rooms in my house and outside. Music Assistant has gotten quite good in working with squeezelite for synced audio

8

Thanks for all the responses! Sounds like I need to get some WROVER boards. I only have a few WROOM right now, so I might try ESPHome on one of those, just to see how bad it is. If nothing else, it could be another bluetooth proxy.