Hey all, first time posting here after lurking for a while;
Setting up a new HA setup for a buddy of mine who is re-doing his house. We are adding switches, plugs, thermostats, cameras, doorbells, etc. We are now stuck in the subject of home audio. His house already has speakers in about 7 rooms. 2-4 per room. His old setup was an amp in his living room with 8 zones where he can turn on/off each zone and then in-wall volume controls for each room.
We are removing the in-wall volume controls (will be controlled through wall mounted tablets or cell phone or google) and i am looking for a replacement amp / solution that will work with HA. The whole audio setup is being relocated to the kitchen area so no need to TV audio going to each room. Our plan was mostly to use either internet radio/spotify/airplay etc. for the rooms. And would be a plus if we can play separate audio in each room.
Any ideas? Thanks in advance.
TLDR; need 8 zone amp that works with HA. One zone for each room. Can control volume and music from HA.
I agree, that’s a pretty decent price for a drop-in solution.
I usually take the DIY route, so hardware wise it would be a 7.1 surround sound receiver/amp and a Pi, or an HDMI audio output with hardware passthrough to a VM. I believe in Linux that surround sound outputs (the HDMI port in this case) are presented as a multichannel audio device which would give you separate access to all the speaker channels.
From there you would use shairport-sync or ALSA loopback devices to generate the audio, and JACK/Carla/non-mixer to route it to the appropriate output, and a node.js script to talk to HA/MQTT/whatever and control the mixer via OSC.
I believe this should all work, but obviously it will take a lot of fiddling around to make it happen! I just thought I’d drop the suggestion here. I usually take the low-budget, pain-in-the-butt options!
Yea i do too but all the DIY options seem to be extremely overly complicated and too many fail points. I think i have settled on getting the Soundavo amp which has built in spotify, radio etc. and works with HA. has 8 channels. Easy setup. For this one i rather spend the money. Some other tasks im taking the DIY route. I pick my battles haha.
Sure. Yep, complicated is how it gets when you’re time-rich and asset-poor, so usually my battles are picked for me by the almighty dollar. Stomping the unreliability out is the fun part! 1600 for the amp and 600-something for an expansion is not too bad either. For a drop-in solution definitely.
found a coupon online and paid $1288 for the amp tax and shipped (Model WS66i. I could only buy the kit that came with the keypads for $100 extra) Found it on a youtube video (easy to find)
I have a Dayton Audio DAX 88. Drives 28 speakers on 7 zones (one is preamp to another Amp). You should not only ask output but also input. My Dax 88 has 7 inputs and one wireless. I use wireless for Spotify and some of the others using output from HA (Pandora,Kodi) and a Volumio machine.
It uses a.slightly modified version of the monoprice integration.
I can set any Zone input to any of local (HA) which is Pandora or Kodi, Alexa, Volumio or a Windows Media Server and of course Wireless which is Spotify or Airplay. I am setting up group modes now like party (everywhere), backyard, frontyard, outside … so that one button tap sets it all including the volume levels.
And while I will not use it until next year, I can daisy chain one to another. The key to this device IMHO is this:
The bottom half of that screen changes based on input type, showing playlists and such. We have a winery and the main tasting folks get to control if they like. So much fun to slide them an iPAD and let they play and control. This is more of the bottom with Spotify playlists. And we cast this screen to televisions so people can see some info, cover art.
