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
I have been using Roon as a music server and think it’s great. Roon It is great if you have your own digital music collection. It is made for audiophile music quality. It integrates with Qobuz, Tidal, KKBOX and internet radio, but not other streaming services like Spottily. It’s like your own streaming music system. You have end points your server can supply a stream to. Many audio systems support it as an end point. My NAD C389 amp integrates seamlessly with it and Home Assistant can control both the amp and the Roon server. For less expensive end points you can load software called Ropeee on a Raspbery Pi with a DAC hat which will supply the audio signal to a small amp. Volume can be controlled by the DAC so your home automation system has complete control. All remotes can be linked to play a stream synchronized (whole house), or you can stream separate music to each end point.The best point is it’s interface, an app you can run off phones, tablets or PCs. What is so great about the app is it serves up lots of info about music, as you play music you can see not only album covers but reviews, often one for the artist, another for the album, and or for the song. As you read about the music every support musician on the album or the artists musical influences are linked to all their albums in your collection so you can jump from one song to instantly play whoever you are reading about. Anyone (guests) can load the app and have all this access too, and que up songs too.