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Comment by emmelaich | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely! I have a 1999 Sony amp and some older (1980s) Wharfedale speakers.

Nothing I've bought in the last 25 years sounds remotely as good as them.

And plugging in a Chromecast audio has given it immortality.

What's the current best alternative to a Chromecast Audio, now that they're discontinued and no longer as readily available?

My current living room setup is a Chromecast Audio connected to an AVR via the optical out connection, which powers my speakers, but I'm curious if there's any alternatives. The eBay sellers are really starting to price-gouge, and I'm not naive enough to believe that my Chromecast Audio will last forever.

I have replaced my Chromecast Audio with Raspberry Pi with a Snapcast client. On the Snapcast server side I run a DLNA renderer ("gmrender resurrect"). This allows me to cast audio synchronously to multiple speakers using the Android app Bubble UPNP. Basically, instead of clicking the cast button in an app, I select share, then Bubble UPNP. One advantage to this is that I can "cast" Youtube and get the audio, which Chromecast audio does not support.

Btw, Snapcast works great.

The latency of your suggestion is making me cringe. Mpd if you desire a sonos-like synchronized low-lag experience. Streaming direct to pulseaudio is also an option, but requires bandwidth (uncompressed audio)

What latency are you referring to? Latency between the source and the sound from the speaker? For me is this only a problem for the audio that goes with video. For pure music I don't mind. But in the video case I switch to pulseaudio directly but obviously lose the multispeaker setup.

Your setup streamed to two different rooms will have two distinct delays of the source audio. Probably fine for most use cases, but drives me nuts and why consumers head to sonos.

Pulseaudio can stream to multiple speakers and audio devices simultaneously. Switching to JACKd instead of gstreamer for the pulseaudio backend allows for a much more powerful audio processing subsystem (at the expense of resources since jackd likes a real-time kernel). Using mpd allows for a lightweight low latency server/client to stream audio to remote destinations. It’s not quite plug and play (DLNA doesn’t care about synchronization) but dropping mpd onto a raspberry pi is the simple fix (and simulates the hardware inside of a sonos speaker)

I’m sorry I’m on mobile or i would make a diagram showing this in detail. I’ve been thinking of what an open source Sonos clone would look like for a long time. Maybe it’s time to open up that git repo to the public

The setup is: the dlna renderer sends it's output to the snapcast server pipe. The snapcast server streams the audio to snapcast clients via a time synced protocol.

The latency you think I have is not there.

You can use a small computer and remote control it somehow.

Or use a Chromecast Ultra and connect to the hi-fi with a hdmi to audio (spdif, 3.5", ...) or hdmi to vga+audio (and don't bother connect the vga to anything)

I have a Google Home mini connected via Bluetooth to my amp, with 25 year old Gale speakers. That works for casting, and of course directly controlling by voice. I previously tried connecting an old Echo Dot via the wired connection, but the quality was a bit rubbish. I'm guessing a crappy DAC in the Echo or something. The sound via Bluetooth is great though.

...until Google kills Chromecast

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