I’d like to set up speakers in my home. I have an old local CD player that has a bolt-on bluetooth adapater, and that is OK, but it’s frustrating - I have an IR blast remote from HA for turning it on, flipping it to bluetooth, etc, but I can’t push audio to it from HA, and I can’t actually see what the device settings are without walking over to it. It feels sooooo 2009. If the remote doesn’t work perfectly, I’m SOL unless I actually (god forbid) stand up and walk over to it.
What I would love to have is a speaker (or two or three) that:
1 - Has excellent sound quality. I. love. my. sound. If it’s scratchy or tinny I will eventually get mad and throw it. My husband has an apple homepod mini. I am looking for something with significantly better quality. That said … it’s still streaming.
2 - I don’t want to run it over the internet. Everyone is all about Sonos, it seems, but I’m not familiar with their ecosystem and marketing doesn’t care to describe what I’m looking for. I haven’t bought speakers since before Sonos was a thing. I’m seeing “app” and “security” and I’m betting this is yet another ecosystem that runs through their remote servers. I don’t want that, I want to control it locally without running what I want to play and when through some third party. And I am not hooking up something with a microphone in my home to a remote company.
If it can be controlled well and easily accessed WITHOUT their app / connecting to their servers, great. I can pop them on the network but block them at the firewall so they can’t communicate out. That’s been my general wifi compromise here.
3 - I want to easily play to it from my (i)phone. Typically via Spotify but whatever else comes along over the next fifteen years, I want to easily connect to it without opening HA and just play to it. I’d rather not need a separate app.
4 - I would like to integrate it to HA. I want to send TTS telling my kids it’s time to go. I want to send audio clips there as part of automations. Maybe, maybe, maybe I could get the mic from the camera by my front door to direct to the speaker nearest me when motion is sensed at the door. I have a squeezlite-type box that has been fun for that.
Integration to HA is actually the lowest priority, since most of the time when I’m listening to something it’s what I’m choosing from Spotify or whatever, but it’s definitely something I’d love to have. If it doesn’t mean connecting the device to remote servers.
Anyone here been down this road already that can advise on this?
