Should I go there? Whole house audio and then some

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Hello! Question from a NOOB. Hope I am in the right place.

I am remodelling my house and I am down to the studs. I am looking to put in 8 sets of wired wired speakers with a 16-channel amp to drive them. I am considering 8 Chromecast Audios as my audio source. I have three already and they seem pretty great. But I am open to other suggestions.

I would like at a minimum:

  • volume controls for each speaker pair that do not require an app to be opened
  • easy selection of audio source at each speaker pair

My contractor is suggesting Control4, Savant, or Sonos… but I hate the idea of limiting my options with one of these. I am an open-source guy with plenty of experience with rpis and other hobbyist stuff.

For less than any of those aforementioned systems I could buy android tablets for each speaker pair… is Home-Assistant what I want? My wife has already told me she will not be happy if she has to talk to something.

Keep in mind my family is not made up of hobbyists and just want to be able to raise and lower the volume and choose which spotify or pandora station to listen to.

The system needs to be a no-brainer to work. Is Home-Assistant there yet?

Thanks for your help!!

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Chromecast is nice.

Volume control at each zone is good, just remember Chromecast also has volume control so this could be something. I used these at my home and never had a complaint from non-techies.

Talking sounds bad but a Alexa makes it seamless. I have customers who’s kids(5-11) use it every day to play music. The wife as well(who also said NO talking crap).

Control Systems like savant and C4 will be worse than HA by itself.

Be aware that Chromecast and Alexa will likely not be around in 5yrs. Something will be there to replace it so you will be OK. Just plan for replacing. I had some Atlas amps with dual input that would mute IN1 when IN2 selected. Good for mute on doorbell ring or if you run 3.5mm to room for optional input(like Alexa). Your selected amp may have same option

Your direction is good.

Select good amp. Multiple small amp may be better than single big amp. Also remember 2ch amp is 2mono zone or 1stereo zone. Mono is good since there is no left right when your walking through a room

Volume controls are good. If not needed you can bypass

Chromecast will be good

Tablets are good but DO NOT do huge in wall custom enclosure. House is 25yrs+ but tablet will be good for 3-5 before it’s outdated or broken…make this look good but temporary. Amazon Fire tablet things are like $25 or $50

There are cat5 adapters for 3.5mm, USB and RCA. Just in case you need.

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A friend of mine has this. He has a multi-zone amp with a serial or ethernet port on it. He can mix and match sources and rooms how he wants. He did his with an RTI as the controller/brain but you could just as easily do it with HASS. Obviously the Amp has volume so that covers that.

I know he uses ATV, Radio, Computer, and other sources for his. You could use any mix of sources you want like Chromecast, ATV, Sonos Connect, Radio.

You do want something that is easily controlled via an API so obviously that cuts down on options. I would look at RPIs, Chromecast or if you want to spend more money and also have Sonos then the Sonos Connect.

I would look at Chromecast and Sonos Connect and lean on Chromecast more.

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I have Sonos and absolutely love them! They are the best for whole home audio imo. They integrate with just about everything and voice is truly the way to go as much as the wife may say no right now. My wife is not a techie either and just wants something simple, yet she uses it every day. I often come into a room and there’s music playing and I’ll ask her, how did you do it and she will say “I asked Alexa”. You should see the proud smile on my face! Once you say, "Alexa, play " or playlist, genre etc. your family won’t want to go to a tablet to change music again.

If you’re wiring speakers, get a few Sonos Connect Amps for the zones and worst case, sell them a few years down the road, they retain their value. But what I like most about Sonos, is they don’t lock you into a particular music service and are great quality. Better yet, look for some used ones locally to save a few bucks.

As for Home Assistant, it’s simple to use, but not yet simple to build. Will take some time to invest how to set everything up and there’s frequent updates so count on fixing a bunch of broken things in your setup every 2 weeks, unless you prefer to stay with an older version for awhile. It’s a double-edged sword, the community and components grow quick, but take a lot of time to keep up.

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I agree with what Jer78 said. My friends and their wives who use Sonos are pretty happy with it. I would try it out too, but I already bought some Chromecast Audios to play around with. Using Alexa is very easy to start playing some music–much faster than opening an app and selecting audio source, or even using Home Assistant. Convince your wife to try it out.

Could you elaborate more on your use cases/scenarios? What streaming music solutions do you use? Do you want all rooms playing the same music, or do you want each room being able to play a different source of music (Pandora, Spotify, Apple Music)? For example, your parents are staying over and want to listen to their music in the guest bedroom. If you want each room to have individual control over the music, then I think a Chromecast Audio and an Amazon Fire tablet, with music apps installed, is the easiest solution. Amazon Fire HD10 tablets have Alexa hands-free mode (don’t have to push a button to speak), so that is essentially an Amazon Echo + tablet.

Oh wait, actually scratch the idea of mixing Chromecast Audios and Amazon tablets together. Alexa can only do multi-room audio with Amazon Echos, not Chromecast. Vice versa with Google Home (as voice) and Amazon Echos (as speakers)

I am having trouble understanding how Home Assistant can help with your situation. Spotify works great with Home Assistant, as long as you have one account. Chromecast Audios & Spotify don’t play well together in Home Assistant–you won’t be able to select any Chromecast Audio device as the Spotify source when using the Home Assistant dashboard. You will have to ask Alexa or use the Spotify app to select the source.

Best of luck! I’m interested to hear how the project turns out.

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Since you are looking to install the 16 channel amp what you could do is wire the 8 zones to 8 Chromecast Audio’s. Sure its going to cost a bit but then you can just tell the Google Home app which Chromecast Audio is assigned to which room and then its simply a matter of selecting an audio source to a room. (Nice HA setup here) You could do this by voice if you have Google Home’s around the place to listen in for your commands. I do this on a smaller scale in my house as I only use 1 Chromecast Audio for the lounge and then Google Homes in other areas

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Thanks! This is great stuff. Couple of questions:

  • Do I have a fire tablet at each location?
  • Do the fire tablets run a web browser (like http://www.ozerov.de/fully-kiosk-browser/) into a HA server or is there HA software running on the fire tablet?
  • Do you have a screenshot of the HA audio interface? Or do I need to write my own? I cannot seem to find a screen shot.
  • Do I have a volume control in addition to the fire tablets?

Really trying to get my head around this. I appreciate your time!

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Hey Dwinnn, Thanks!

We plan on streaming mostly our home library from a NAS, spotify and pandora. Possibly audible. But that would be rare.

I love the fact that I can gang chromecast audios together in any arbitrary group. Not sure how I would do that with Sonos… but I have no idea how sonos works. Can I gang Echos together?

I seems like every path I walk down there are too many compromises. Damn!

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Yep… We already have the Chromecast audios and a google home for testing. I can gang them together in arbitrary groups. Works great… BUT… My wife says “no way voice commands will work for her in the house.”
She has already tried and hates it. :frowning:

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you dont HAVE to use voice control. The Chromecast Audio’s are just your output device, how you control them is up to you. I use a combination of voice control and via the HassIO frontend.

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Okay, now I see what you’re trying to understand. It is hard to visualize what Home Assistant is (it’s everything! jk) without actually installing it first.

You can use any Amazon Fire tablet and browser (I recommend Fully Kiosk Browser) to load the Home Assistant dashboard (which is a fancy webpage, like http://hassio.local:8123) running off a Raspberry Pi with Home Assistant installed (this is the HA server). There is an official iOS app that works pretty well on iPhone. Don’t know if it displays well on an iPad. The HA demo here https://home-assistant.io/demo/ gives you a good idea of what it will look like on the Fire tablet, or any device that runs a supported web browser.

  • Do I have a fire tablet at each location?

You can use any device that runs a web browser, but Fire tablets work well with Home Assistant.

  • Do you have a screenshot of the HA audio interface? Or do I need to write my own? I cannot seem to find a screen shot.

I think this is the part you will run into trouble, because Home Assistant isn’t focused on audio. You can add a media player component, like the Spotify player, and that will give you basic functionality like play, pause, next track. See screenshot of the Spotify player on the dashboard here:

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The media player shows up as a ‘card’ in the UI. You can click on the ‘three dots’ and you get some additional options, but that’s it for the Spotify component. You can’t change too much unless you write your own custom card, which requires some web development skill.

You can’t browse through playlists with the current Spotify component. Pandora is another component you have to add, and that component looks more difficult to setup as it is using another open-source program called Pianobar (https://home-assistant.io/components/media_player.pandora/)

  • Do I have a volume control in addition to the fire tablets?

The Spotify volume control you see in the screenshot above works pretty well, because Spotify’s API lets you set volume control easily. For Pandora and Audible, I don’t know.

Basically, I think Home Assistant won’t be able to do what you want without some major customization

I’ll give you something else to research…there is another platform called Volumio that has a slick web UI to browse your local files from a NAS, and a Spotify plugin that does let you browse through playlists. Unfortunately you cannot use Chromecast Audios or Amazon Echos to play music through Volumio–it will only play through the Raspberry Pi (where Volumio server is installed) or through the USB DAC attached to it. You could potentially install Snapcast server on your Volumio server, and then put Raspberry Pis w/ Snapcast in each of the rooms and connect each to a set of speakers…but you can imagine how messy that gets. I wouldn’t do it unless you have a good understanding of Linux and installing packages on your own.

As of early December 2017, Spotify supports Amazon Echo’s multi-room audio feature. It takes a long time to add support to Amazon Echo multi-room, so I think it only works with Spotify, Pandora, and Amazon Music.

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the link i put in post #6 is a nice way of creating your own internet radio selection ‘media player’ which also has control of chromecast devices, volume etc.as an alternative to something like Spotify.

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I have the Monoprice 6-zone unit (https://home-assistant.io/components/media_player.monoprice/). I belive it is a rebrand (or at least similar specs) of a russound caa66 system. Product link: https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=10761

I actually paid over 600 bucks for it when it first came out. I love it. I am able to run up to 6 sources from it. with home assistant I can be playing music via one chromecast and have it interrupted with a different chromecast source (google text to speech notification for example) and then resume playing original source. I have only been running home assistant for about 5 days but have it setup and working perfectly already. Nice thing is wife and kids can use control pads on the wall to select source and control volume if they chose to not use home assistant.

price is right especially if you can snag it with a 20% off coupon that monoprice runs every now and then. Its actually on sale for 449 shipped right now.

Neil

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The Monoprice unit is great. I paid $420 for my first one and bought a second refurb for $200. For $660 I have a 12x6 audio matrix that fully integrates with my HomeAssistant setup.

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Slightly off topic, but to play your local music, Spotify, and Pandora through the Chromecast Audios, look into Mopidy instead of Volumio. The latest post (1/15/18) from this topic (Spotify in combination with chromecast) mentions a detailed tutorial to install Mopidy, Icecast, and get it working with the Chromecast Audios.

Once you build Mopidy, you can add an iframe side panel to Home Assistant that lets you view the Mopidy UI within Home Assistant.

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Look into a Plex server
Between Plex and streaming radio apps this is interface I would go with.

If you ever use Chromecast you might know that when you cast to device, every device on wifi shows control interface. At least with Android. I would imagine same for Amazon’s tablets but who knows with their wat with Google.

Chromecast has volume control. The casting device controls with volume buttons on tablet or you can use Google Home app to control from any device.

I would create some automations in HA to control generic things or give you ability to do doorbell through Chromecast (I wired doorbell to Pi and played doorbell through Chromecast when it pushed)

Yes. Kiosk mode and maybe specific Group tab for each room

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All of these are good solutions, but the reason Sonos stands out as the best is it is the best and easiest to use with little configuration. To build any of these ideas, requires a lot of time and it’s all put together with “bubblegum” imo. If something breaks, your family will be screaming at you to fix it, immediately!

Sonos with Alexa is as easy as this…

“Alexa, play artist name/genre/song title in the room”
“Alexa, turn up the volume in the room”
“Alexa, pause the music in the room”

They are still in public beta with the Sonos/Alexa integration but coming soon is grouping speakers (can be done from the Sonos app) and “smart rooms” which means that you won’t have to say the room you want to play in, it will automatically play based on the one that’s the closest to the Alexa speaker you asked it from.

Another cool feature with Sonos, is they eliminate the “sorry you’re playing music already from this account, so playback is stopped”. So if you subscribe to one Spotify premium account, you can play different songs on different speakers in the house and it won’t stop or not play. To my knowledge, this won’t work with all the other solutions mentioned here.

There’s a lot of other advantages for Sonos, such as if you have a Playbase or Playbar hooked to your TV and it’s playing music, as soon as you turn on the TV, it disconnects itself from the group and plays from the TV.

I’ve tried so many whole home audio projects in the past and I’m convinced Sonos is worth it’s weight in gold!

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Whatever you do, I wouldn’t hitch your wagon to one particularly system. Sure, design and optimize for a particular system right now, but I recommend having some platform neutral wiring for both audio and controls that go back to wherever you’d put a “receiver,” since you’re down to the studs.

Who knows what you’ll want in ten years!

Also, if you’re thinking of going with home assistant, get quantity 1 of all of the hardware you need, and get playing with it now. :slight_smile:

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All of this can currently be done with Chromecast Audio and Google Assistant, as ISNT in beta…

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I wasn’t under the impression you could use the same streaming music service in multiple rooms at the same time.