I’ve been reading through various threads here and on the Music Assistant blog along with Reddit but haven’t found discussion of this, so any suggestions much appreciated. I have a 12-zone audio system (with a couple of additional zones taken up by line-level subwoofer feeds) that Control4 has done a generally good job of managing for 15 years, but I’m ready to move on from C4. Currently I have an EA5 at the heart of that sending streams to a Triad 16x16 matrix, which in turn sends the audio to two Triad 8-zone amps. All speakers have home runs to the rack where these amps are located.
Subject to any advice to the contrary from the community, I want to replace C4 with Music Assistant to manage the streams (and some local CD rips), with the ability to play any source to one or more zones. Two simultaneous sources is adequate, but I want the ability to play at least two different sources to various zones simultaneously. I understand that I can’t play two streams from, say, Spotify simultaneously (absent multiple accounts or a family account); I’m really talking about playing, say, SiriusXM and Pandora at the same time to different zones.
I have looked at using the HA automation for controlling the Triad matrix and thought about trying to use it with MA, but that’s more pioneering than I want to be. I’ll mess with automations for lights and whatnot all day long, but music needs to work reliably when I want it without continual tinkering.
It would make a lot of sense, though, to keep using my two Triad multi-zone amps. So my question is what hardware I need to use MA as my interface for selecting and playing music sources across all these zones. I have considered a rack full of Sonos amps, which reportedly work great with MA, but that’s crazy expensive and I already have capable amplification. What I need (I think) is either a device or a bunch of devices that can receive streams directed by MA (by DLNA?) and send them to the appropriate zone inputs on my Triad amps.
In any case, one of my key objectives is to add Apple Music as a source because C4 doesn’t support it without one of the more modern Core devices, and before I fork out the price for to replace my EA5 when it otherwise works fine, it seems like I could solve this more efficiently (I have considered adding a C4 Core 1 to my setup, as the system just needs a Core processor somewhere to unencrypt the Apple Music stream, but even that’s a good bit of money).
Related to that objective, a key criterion is support for 24-bit/192 kHz for the Apple Music stream (and whatever other streams eventually get on the bus for lossless audio).
Is there an RPi solution to this? Or does someone manufacture a device that I haven’t found in my searching? I believe that I need something like a Sonos amp without the amp, basically a preamp that takes as its source a stream (or, ideally, two or more streams) from Music Assistant and outputs the audio to my multi-zone amps.