I need your help. During the next year, I will build my dream house. Have plans for network and HA will of course be the heart of everything together with unifi network. BUT I have a problem I can’t solve myself that I need your help with. My plan is to have ceiling speakers in the kitchen/dining room/lounge room and the living room. In the living room iam thinking about Sonos wall spekar to get a 5.1 system or 7.2. But how can i control it all using HA? what amp is the best my guess is that it will need to be available to control 4 zones. The dream had been to be able to use HA voice in all the rooms and it will send the sound out to speakers depending on where you are in the house.
Is Sonos still a thing? I avoid proprietary as eventually it becomes a pain or the drop support. Unless your moving in 5 yrs maybe don’t do Sonos
I advise either:
Denon AV receiver
Or
Individual amplifier
DENON
They have api and HA integration
You may control volume through HA in UI or by voice command
Over the years I found these and onkyo to be good. Also I buy lots of used and they are always available on market.
AV receiver excepts multiple input and also allow video routing to TV
This allow for 7.1 or whatever you plan to do
Usually they have dual zone but I generally don’t use mostly out of laziness. I would use second zone for combining multiple room into single zone or possible 2 mono audio only zones (ask for details if you care to know how this can work).
Generally 7.1 zones are for TV area so I would have multiple AVR, 1 for each area.
This just covers TV and Audio really. The voice part is more complex
INDIVIDUAL AMPLIFIER
Source device must have ability to control output to control volume in most cases or you must have volume control on wall.
How this works is straight forward. Multi channel amps. Left,right or individual channel is a mono zone. Combine 2 channel for stereo zone. This gets weird for TV becuase now you still ne AVR/preamp to send audio from TV source and it gets messy. In both case if music is primary purpose you’ll have no problem.
VOICE
If using AVR the device, whatever you use can always listen. Respond may require you to pause current source>>switch sound to voice source>> send voice response. Again, this is minor issue when TV watching possibly since source may not be same but if always music I imagine it may be same source device.
Not sure if you know about music assistant but it may be useful for you