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Comment by colinb | Hacker News Reader

Forgive my thread hijacking, but I suspect this is a place with people who might know the answer to my question.

Given that I have a pair of reasonably nice speakers but a lack of convenient wiring opportunities, I had thought to come up with something like an RPi based amplifier connected to each, with WiFi linking the two to form a stereo pair.

I.e. I have two speakers. Putting both of them near mains electricity is easy. Having wires connecting both to the same amp is a PITA. What cover thing could I do?

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Not an expert but I think synchronising the signals might be challenging if you hack it yourself. I know Airplay 2 has the feature to pair speakers so perhaps if you can get Airplay 2 working on rpi then it might work. But in my experience the rpi experience is sub par; it was working great while it was working and then all of a sudden it stopped working.

It's very difficult and fighting an uphill battle to get two totally independent wifi music receivers to together output a single stero signal split across them. I don't think even dedicated systems like Sonos support it. Run speaker wire around the room perimeter to an amp and you will be infinitely happier.

It’s a massive challenge implementing this yourself but various smart speaker protocols have supported syncing speakers for a while now. I can’t speak for if they also split stereo signals (I think I read Yamaha can) but splitting a stereo signal is very easy even without comparing it to the challenge of syncing speakers.

> I don't think even dedicated systems like Sonos support it.

They do. So do HomePods, other mass brands. Not my cup of tea, but people seem to love them when they work.

If you want to attempt this you should use jack and one of the real time jack network protocols. I had it working for an hour, but the setup is too complex for leave everything in place setup. Was cool when it worked. I might have played more but I discovered that I couldn't do a mixer in the one room and keep the sync. (I was trying to do live music with listening in the next room so latency was important and I couldn't add delay to cheat)

I wish someone would spend time making the above easy, jack has some neat abilities that are lacking in all the whole house systems i've seen. Or maybe I just want to do weird things?

Bookshelf speakers in a small room only really need to be 4' apart, up to 6' or 8' for floor-standers in a large room. You could run the wires behind items on a shelf, under the floor, through a "wiremold" cover, paint the wire and tack it along a baseboard, or try "flat speaker wire".

I'm unclear of the exact problem. Are you having a problem with powering two passive speakers from the same amplifier? Or you have two active speakers (each with its own internal amplifier and plug into the wall) and you have a problem with connecting a stereo music source to them?

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