Looking for hardware ideas for audio distribution

Hi there,

Complete and total HA noob here.

We’re building a new house and I’ve got it wired suitably for network and such.

Main A/V will be in the living room where I’ve got a 7/1 system planned that will be controlled with a Yamaha AVR suitable for integration with HA.

I’ve got a Synology NAS with Emby that I use for media distribution.

LOML has expressed a desire for audio in a couple of other rooms. I’m planning more ceiling mount speakers, but I’m struggling with how to drive them. I’ve got an eye level outlet on the wall that I’m going to put an Android tablet on to control the local audio. At present I’ve got two zones to feed.

What I’m searching for, rather unsuccessfully, is a means to drive the speakers.

Initially I thought I’d grab a couple of the now deprecated Chromecast audio dohicky’s and plug them into a Lepai (or similar) amp, but this seem a bit backwoods, and goodness knows how long the Chromecast things will be viable before my “friends” at Google kill them. I would also rather not have hardware “calling home” from my HA system.

I’ve looked at the Monoprice 6 zone home amplifier, but this seems overkill and a bit of a cluge with the serial interface.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

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I have the monoprice amp (2 here shortly), and I have them sourced by a couple of chromecasts, my TVs, and Apple TV.

I hate having Google in my home, but their Audio Chromecasts are the best. I have tried a couple of different ideas, and none of them worked as well.

Here are some other options:
Sonos.
Pros: Sound and grouping are nothing short of amazing.
Cons: They are very impressed with themselves and ask you to pay for it.

Logitech Media Server:
NOTE: I just did some test bench stuff.
Pros: Will do the synch well.
Cons: You have to decide how you want to do implement it hardware wise. You can run the player on Rasberry PIs, and some other hardware options. You can even add an psuedo amp to a Pi and power some speakers OR use the headphone out and run it through an AMP (That was my plan). PIs are getting better to acquire, but when I went down this path it was a PITA to get one.

Russound:
Pros: Cool stuff. very easy to setup and use. I had one of their streaming basic pieces of hardware, and it was fun.
Cons: $$$$

I have also looks at MusicCast, BlueSound, Volumio.

You can choose really any of these and I suspect you will be happy. I went with the Monoprice as an audiophile I am a component-based traditionalist. I like the modularity and flexibility it offers.

Is it as nice as say a Sonos and I can group all my speakers quickly, and HA integrates nicely? No.

Do I have a fear that they will go belly up tomorrow, and I’ll have a dead piece of equipment that I can’t plug something else into? No. I’ll throw my Chromecasts in the trash, and find another streaming pre-amp device.

Thanks.

Will investigate.

I’ve actually got 2 rpi’s that I bought off of Mycroft when they were selling them off. This might be the ultimate solution.

chris

I’ve got 4 CCA’s driving 2x ancient Russound CAV controllers and it works well. If I were going to do it today, I’d probably look at the Wiim Pro which supports more than just google casting and also has ethernet for more reliable connectivity. It’s also quite a bit more expensive than CCA’s but they recently were Roon certified as well and should be supported longer than CCA’s. Wiim posts a aspirational roadmap on their site.

Those look really nice! I currently run CCA’s as well but have often wondered what I’d do if they fail or I want them in more locations.

Yeah same. AFAICT, the only speaker grouping system that supports a source device in mutiple groups is Chromecast. Makes the the voice integration + zone automation very seamless for much less cost than other systems.

Given that the Wiim supports the Google cast function I’d imagine that it would act the same as a CCA in this respect, albeit for a lot more money… but hey, they are available.

This has all been great info.

Another option I have is that I currently own 3 video Chromecasts that I could get a HDMA audio out device to use with. That might be the cheapest solution at this juncture.

One question, what’s a CCA?

The Wiim is very cool, but I would still need an amp, so that’s getting a bit spendy for what I’m wanting to do. I have filed it for future reference.

CCA=Chromecast Audio

It is the old version of the Chromecast which only did audio.

CCA

I have 6 different audio zones in my house, not counting the theater room. 4 are pairs of in-ceiling Klipsch speakers, 1 is a pair of bookshelf speakers, and the last is a pair of outdoor speakers. There is a volume knob on the wall in each location. I used these volume knobs: https://amzn.to/3QzJdoA

They are impedance matching, and have a little switch on them for how many speakers you want to run from a single channel - so you can actually drive multiple pairs of speakers from the same amp channel without overloading the amp. They work REALLY well, and when I first set this up, I had only two channels - the main floor and the upper floor. Eventually I figured out that having separate channels worked much better for us, so I bought two more amps and changed the switches on each volume control to only a single pair of speakers.

When we remodeled, I pulled speaker wire from all the locations back down to the AV room in the basement. Each pair (channel) is independently driven by a Yamaha receiver. I have two RX-V6As and an old RX-V680-something (I forget). Since each receiver is capable of driving 2 zones, that gets me a total of 6 discrete channels.

At $400 each for the V6As, that’s a cost of $200 per channel to drive the speakers, plus the cost of the wire and the speakers.

Each channel can use the tuner (of course), but since each receiver only has a single tuner, I had to be selective in which 2 channels I paired together on what amp. I chose adjacent spaces, figuring that you’d go from one space to the next and want to hear the same music. Want the same radio station everywhere? Set all three tuners to the same station and power on all 6 channels.

For distributing digital audio, I’m using Chromecasts. The main channel on each receiver gets audio from the HDMI connection on the Chromecast, and zone_2 gets audio via an HDMI to RCA converter: https://amzn.to/3DPXOoc

For “party mode”, I have an HDMI splitter: https://amzn.to/3E8AaDH that has a Chromecast running it, which is split into 4 outputs. Each output goes to an HDMI in on the receiver, and then zone_2 on each receiver is just set to party mode with the main_zone, so the same audio plays everywhere with no delay between the various channels.

I use a Plex server to serve up the thousands of audio files I’ve amassed over the years.

As an aside, if you don’t want to use an HDMI splitter, you can create Chromecast groups in the Google Home app, which will then show up both in HA as well as Plex. I was doing this for a while, but for some reason I found that some devices would drop off the group. Never did figure out why. It’s only the Chromecasts, the group I have for my Google Nest Minis that I use for TTS announcements works just fine.

As for the dashboard, I custom wrote one to manage it all, complete with buttons to switch between inputs/party mode, set the tuner, etc.

I also made a volume control since the Yamaha receivers don’t use 1-10, but rather they use dB, which goes from -80 or so to +16 (depends on the channel). I posted about most of this on here last summer when I got it all set up, but I’ll be making a YouTube video about it and posting it to my channel as well in the coming months.

All off:

Example of tuner control:

All on (the old VX680-something (kitchen and deck) doesn’t have tone controls on zone_2):

Hope this helps!

Before Google screwed us over.

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Wow. Thanks.

Looked up the RXV6a’s. They are $750 now! :open_mouth:

I’m prolly just gonna bite the bullet and get a couple of CCA’s.

I’ve got outlets on the wall in the appropriate rooms that I’m going to mount tablets on.

Short term my wife can just play what she wants from there. Long term, they will be access panels for the HA.

Appreciate all the great info.

chris

Hey all,

It’s been a while since we had this chat.

All the hardware, including a Home-Assistant yellow, is up and running.

I’ve got 2 CCA driving AIYIMA A07 TPA3255 amplifiers.

All this was suitably recognized by HA.

I have yet to set up the tablets for mounting on the wall.

Short term we will control all this through Google home, until I get my feet under me setting up dashboards.

I’ll chime in from time to time with progress.

Cheers

Chris

For anyone looking for an RX-V6A: This is the Costco-specific version of that model. Specs are identical. $449. No idea how w00t got ahold of it, but it’ll save you a few hundred bucks:

I got one last time they were offered on Woot. It works great.

Highly recommended

Ok,

Sorry for the gap, but life gets in the way sometimes.

Let’s preface this with the fact that this will be my first real “dashboard”.

As a precursor, I’m fairly fluent in python, very fluent in VBA, sorta fluent in C. Just to set the stage.

I’ve got two Samsung tablets to hang on the wall of the house to act, at least for now, as audio control stations for the speakers mounted to the ceilings in the particular rooms.

As mentioned above, I’ve got two CCA’s driving discrete amplifiers which power the speakers. All this works perfectly fine through Google Home.

My wife is very limited in her technical wherewithal so I want to build an interface for her to play music.

I’ve got a number of media applications installed on the tablets, Kodi, Youtube, Pandora, etc.

Ideally I would like an interface with a display on the one side which allows the selection of a desired app and then switches to showing the active application and a control panel on the other side where she can pick which speaker(s) to play music to, a volume control and any other “controls” that might be helpful.

Is this even possible within the HA framework?

If so how would I go about doing it? I’m not asking for you to design it, just give me an idea of the bits and bobs necessary to build it. I don’t even know where to start.

This project is twofold.

The first, obviously, to get a system for my wife to use.

The second, is to learn about HA so I can do wonderful things in the future.

Thank you

Here’s Part 1 of how I did all this. Part 2 is more the HA integration and dashboard side of the house.

Hopefully you find some useful information in one of them!