Media player speaker always idle

I’ve setup VLC directly on my RP3 running HA. I’ve then added a little hamburger speaker directly attached to the Pi to play TTS messages.

For some reason the speaker remains idle at all times. I can create the MP3 files when triggering automations but it just doesn’t play.

I have tested the speaker and do get sound from it direct from the pi when running commands from my Putty connection but through HA just nothing.

Any suggestions?

Anyone had a similar issue. Speaker remains idle at all times