I've spent countless hours searching for a small, good quality passive speaker. In a roughly 4 inch cube size. That comes with an good (acoustically) box/enclosure. Plenty exist in various forms (kits) but I never know if they sound as good as even laptop or phone speakers. Which is a low bar, but still can't find good reviews.
Pine64 launch $50 smart speaker for Home Assistant tinkerers
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Re: Pine64 launch $50 smart speaker for Home Assistant tinkerers
#52i wish for and fantasize about building something like this every time my alexa starts following up with an ad for a feature i will never want or use. glad to see this exists!
Re: Pine64 launch $50 smart speaker for Home Assistant tinkerers
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What I like about Pine64 is that they go for low price points. Sometimes I wish they would charge a little more and use that extra $$$ to pay someone to make the things work. there are too many rough edges that a full time developer would just fix, but nobody in the community gets "a round touit". These are things I could fix, but after my day job and getting my kids to everything I don't have energy left to focus.
As an embedded engineer, I tend to agree. Their hardware looks good, but I am not going to spend my free time getting their software to work as well as I know it could if they hired someone like me. Huh, maybe I should contact them, since I am freelancing now….
It sounds to me like you and people like gp could both be served by a bounty mechanism that doesn't have to include Pine64.
Re: Pine64 launch $50 smart speaker for Home Assistant tinkerers
#54I've spent countless hours searching for a small, good quality passive speaker. In a roughly 4 inch cube size. That comes with an good (acoustically) box/enclosure. Plenty exist in various forms (kits) but I never know if they sound as good as even laptop or phone speakers. Which is a low bar, but still can't find good reviews.
A 4-inch cube doesn't leave much room for a passive speaker to be very good (depending on one's definition of "good").
We've got hard physical constraints with loudspeaker systems, and they show up as tradeoffs.
Very broadly speaking, in practical terms, this takes the form of a tradeoff betwixt enclosure volume, efficiency, and low-end frequency extension. It's impossible to improve all three of these at once. This was formalized with Thiele and Small's work ~60 years ago.
We get by with amazingly good small, self-amplified, active speakers these days because -- as a system -- they don't have the same constraints.
At their root, they're still just passive speakers... but whole of an active system comprises more than that. We can use EQ to improve low-end extension. We can use bigger amplifiers to make up for lack of efficiency.
We can use combinations of dynamic EQ and bigger amps to make small systems sound pretty darned good even at low volume and hold together nicely at higher volumes, thanks in part of some of the work of Fletcher and Munson nearly a century ago and also to modern measurement systems and the inexpensiveness of implementing functions (with DSP in 2026) that would have been unthinkably complex in the consumer analog space at any point on the timeline.
But while active speakers can be pretty neat, small passive speakers suck. They have always sucked in some way. They must always suck in some way compared to their larger peers, and a cube shape always makes some aspects of the suck even worse. Them's the breaks.
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Anyway, the market wants small, active speakers these days...so we get small, active speakers. Reviewers are people too, and they review what people want to buy.
If I may ask: What's driving your desire for a small speaker that is also passive?
Re: Pine64 launch $50 smart speaker for Home Assistant tinkerers
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is false for reasons that have nothing to do with analog vs digital. Analog doesn't allow all the tricks the loudness wars required to win, so often analog really was better than digital. That is garbage in garbage out, and analog got less garbage on the input side. When someone who cares about good music in a perfect listening environment mixes and masters everything to the best of the technology, then digital…
I feel like mastering shouldn't be a factor in this, because yeah some CDs where obviously terribly done to sound louder but that isn't a quality of the format itself
It's capitalism making things worse again.
CDs improved over LPs in dynamic range, frequency response, error correction, replayability, stereo separation, and noise floor. They also, at scale, became much cheaper to manufacture and distribute.
But if the engineers, producers and marketers insist on not using the technical capabilities, or deliberately degrading them to chase perceived loudness, there's nothing the purchaser can do except complain.
Re: Pine64 launch $50 smart speaker for Home Assistant tinkerers
#56Would be curious if this could be made to support sendspin (and is this technology the best for an open "homegroup" like audio experience)?
Re: Pine64 launch $50 smart speaker for Home Assistant tinkerers
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is false for reasons that have nothing to do with analog vs digital. Analog doesn't allow all the tricks the loudness wars required to win, so often analog really was better than digital. That is garbage in garbage out, and analog got less garbage on the input side. When someone who cares about good music in a perfect listening environment mixes and masters everything to the best of the technology, then digital…
I feel like mastering shouldn't be a factor in this, because yeah some CDs where obviously terribly done to sound louder but that isn't a quality of the format itself
What matters is the final result not the parts.
Re: Pine64 launch $50 smart speaker for Home Assistant tinkerers
#58I really wish someone would come out with a $25 "box" that sits on top of my bookshelf speaker that allows me to Airplay to it and power said speaker with a ~50w class-D amp. Then if I have multiple ones, it would allow them to pair and setup stereo or surround sound. I might even pay $50 for it. Kinda like a Sonos Amp but not at that price point.
WiiM makes a few.
With or without amp.
It can be had for about ~40 refurbished from what I suspect to be their eBay store.
Airplay 2. I have it hooked via optical to a soundbar.
Re: Pine64 launch $50 smart speaker for Home Assistant tinkerers
#59I'm half surprised they are still around as they seem to never restock most of their products, and half pleased they are still around and releasing products.
> as they seem to never restock most of their products There is a product development strategy (I'm not sure if there's a formal name for it) where you're given a lead on a finite-but-large supply of parts you can acquire for absurdly cheap; so you buy the batch; develop and price a product around the part; market your product until you run out of the part; and then, rather than switching over to paying retail for th…
> only ever to be fulfilled if you happen to get another lead on a cheap supply of that same part
I've also heard that's how McDonalds does McRib sandwiches—they only offer it when pork futures are cheap enough.
Re: Pine64 launch $50 smart speaker for Home Assistant tinkerers
#60Great price for such a device! Once I had an idea to fix something like this using raspberry pi zero and Jabra USB conference speaker. I had almost the same use case for it. To use it with openclaw and openrouter models connected with my full raspberry pi running home automation