I’m searching for some advice for the audio-out part of my home assistant voice assistant setup. I have the M5Stack atom echo that works well enough as a microphone, but as an audio-out device it doesn’t have good enough sound. I am at the same time planning to buy some high-quality stereo speakers for the TV and for music.
So I’m looking for ways to use the speakers as audio-out devices as well, in a way that supports streaming audio. Currently have google nest speakers, but those don’t support direct streaming like the atom echos does (way too high latency for long audio clips). So I’m thinking I need some device that can receive streaming audio, and transmit the signal to the new speakers via optical link. It’s important that the hub or speakers I link to switches to the correct audio in channel when relevant (TV vs. voice assistant).
Anyone else with a similar setup? I already have an Atom S3 Lite ESP32S3, which can probably be part of the solution. But I don’t know what to pair it with to get optical out.
These are the speakers I’m thinking of buying, plus the hub:
Im what way? What additional hardware are you using besides the esp32 and a speaker? You are using an external amplifier, right?
I typically just add Bluetooth audio receiver modules and then hook them up to my esp32 media players or you can connect them to any speakers you want and that will allow you to use the speakers as if they were a typical wireless BT speaker and can be connected to from anyones phone, pc, tablet or whatever since that module basically turns speakers into a BT capable speakers…
The atom echo is its own speaker, that’s what I’m using as audio out now. It works fine, except for that the volume is too low. Not sure if getting an external amplifier for the echo is the way to go? In my case, the Hub will be hidden away behind a TV, so not in a suitable place for the microphone to be, which currently is the atom echo.
Would prefer to stick to wifi & optical cabling and not to go the BT route as I don’t have a BT dongle or proxy.
Well ya, no kidding the audio sucks that thing is basically a toy speaker…
Well, do you understand what an amplifier is for and what it does? Yes dude, you need an external amp for that thing. That little toy speaker is just for demonstration to show you how you can setup a microphone and a speaker but, this goes back to what i was saying about needing to think differently or thinking outside the box. If it can use that baby speaker than obviously it can do a larger and louder speaker and thats what you have to do your research into figuring out instead of thinking you’re actually supposed to use that thing and it will be useful at all.
It can be hard for new people to wrap their head around how to best use these devices and probably because so many people are used to unboxing a product and setting it up how the manufacturer designed it to be set up but, this is the complete opposite mindset you need to have when working with DIY projects and you have to keep yourself open to the idea that for one thing, you can absolutely change or modify things to be how you want it and second, there’s no one right way to do something.
You really probably shouldn’t be trying to place a microphone right next to your tv anyway because, you’re just asking for it to struggle with false positives from all the sounds/voices it picks up from directly next to the tv.
These are some of the amps that I use for esp32 media projects and they’re capable of pushing out quite a bit of audio on 2 channels but, these arent the only option available and you should use whichever is best for you and this is just an example of what im talking about.