31–40 of 49 posts
It looks so much of an overkill on the digital side. A fully fledged SoC with PCI Express and standalone WiFi NIC just to do network, and audio decode? Chinese factories make such Internet radios on $2 Espressif or Realtek microcontrollers.
It looks so much of an overkill on the digital side. A fully fledged SoC with PCI Express and standalone WiFi NIC just to do network, and audio decode? Chinese factories make such Internet radios on $2 Espressif or Realtek microcontrollers.
Worth noting on the wireless side that this unit, if plugged to Ethernet, will create a dedicated SonosNet network your other Sonos speakers would then automatically join. So it’s not just a client, it’s also a base station.
Much more than just playback.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It looks like the processor is doing some form of DSP, so some smarts are required. It can also play from Spotify etc. and the binaries for that are probably bloated like most cloud services. With this said, had this been a lower end product, the SoC would probably have been an Allwinner or MTK with a soldered Realtek SDIO WiFi solution.
> It can also play from Spotify etc. and the binaries for that are probably bloated like most cloud services. One of my favourite things about my Sonos setup is that it avoids me having to run bloated cloud service binaries on my personal computing devices. (Most notably, of the services I use, SiriusXM digital services have always been most unpleasant to use.)
You could VLAN them into a separate audio-devices network and whitelist their Internet access but the effort in doing that would seem to outweigh any advantages of network audio devices.
Sometimes a dumb, network-unaware Bluetooth audio sink just works...
Most wireless speakers released nowadays have a digital EQ to compensate for differences in frequency response to simulate accuracy. However the fact that this EQ is now being utilized on a different set of speakers makes this build far from "high quality".
So the result with different speakers will be mediocre at best and indeed far from high quality, even with a high quality speaker strapped on to it.
I find it odd to have a hacker project that connects to a proprietary ecosystem (Sonos). In general, I'm disappointed that Ikea went with Sonos, it's not very "people and planet" to be dependent on one company and app to enable different sound ecosystems, without even a Bluetooth option.
There are proprietary competitors (Alexa is moving into that space, and Bose has an even more expensive equivalent), but nothing to allow true interop, and Ikea trying to build out that same functionality from scratch would take huge effort and expense, certainly a lot more than the simple-by-comparison requirements of smart bulbs.
Personally, I'd be happy to see Apple eat everyone's lunch here (they're already partway there with arbitrary speaker output from arbitrary input devices), but that's mostly because there's preexisting homebrew that will that bridges arbitrary speakers to virtual Airplay devices and arbitrary input to virtual Airplay streams.
I find it odd to have a hacker project that connects to a proprietary ecosystem (Sonos). In general, I'm disappointed that Ikea went with Sonos, it's not very "people and planet" to be dependent on one company and app to enable different sound ecosystems, without even a Bluetooth option.
I don't think there's any alternative open standard that can do what Sonos does - group speakers arbitrarily, do line-in without requiring separate computers/phones, auto-balance speaker volume/lag for room positioning, have the same speaker set switch between surround sound and other inputs with minimum hassle, etc, and all wirelessly without a specific server hub needed. There are proprietary competitors (Alexa is…
Got a recommendation?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think there's any alternative open standard that can do what Sonos does - group speakers arbitrarily, do line-in without requiring separate computers/phones, auto-balance speaker volume/lag for room positioning, have the same speaker set switch between surround sound and other inputs with minimum hassle, etc, and all wirelessly without a specific server hub needed. There are proprietary competitors (Alexa is…
> preexisting homebrew that will that bridges arbitrary speakers to virtual Airplay devices Got a recommendation?
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/4-airplay-receivers-that-are-c...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think there's any alternative open standard that can do what Sonos does - group speakers arbitrarily, do line-in without requiring separate computers/phones, auto-balance speaker volume/lag for room positioning, have the same speaker set switch between surround sound and other inputs with minimum hassle, etc, and all wirelessly without a specific server hub needed. There are proprietary competitors (Alexa is…
> preexisting homebrew that will that bridges arbitrary speakers to virtual Airplay devices Got a recommendation?