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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

I really don't know why stereo components do not communicate digitally via ethernet cables. The only thing that won't work for is the output of the power amp.

My stereo is the usual rat's nest of various cables and connectors. I also have a tub full of various plugs, adapters, etc. Wouldn't it be nice to have a receiver that just had an ethernet connector on the back? Run it to an ethernet switch, and plug your turntable, TV, cassette player, into the switch?

One cool consequence is your components could be anywhere in the house, as any component could play over any powered speaker in the house.

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> I really don't know why stereo components do not communicate digitally via ethernet cables.

If you’re building a new pro audio setup today, be it studio or even live sound, that’s likely how you’re doing it.

Even 20 years ago we had digital audio routers that worked pretty decently (not great, but well enough). This was a recording studio of course, not a home audio setting.

The reason we don’t have this in consumer audio is almost certainly cost. Now you need to add a ADC, Ethernet, and a small chip to run it all. Meanwhile nobody wants to run cables anymore and WiFi is everywhere. But of course putting WiFi in everything drives cost too.

I've used a couple of single/dual/tri-band wireless transmitters to hook up speakers, and I'd say I'm not really a fan. You have to be ok with dropped packets from interference (which happens pretty frequently if you're also sharing your 2.4/5/6ghz spectrum with WiFi), which is audible as silence or wrong sounds.

Or you're using a protocol that does retransmission/buffering, which introduces noticeable latency with the video or even between speakers.

WiFi is not so good as a replacement for wires — the latency is too high. The main contenders seem to be Dirac and AVB, both of which run over Ethernet. Dirac uses entirely ordinary Ethernet, and AVB wants some fancy extensions, which will bump up the price of your switches quite a bit.

For good audio, you want known, controlled latency, preferably with quite precise timing. For live audio, or for a fully convenient replacement for analog cable, you want that known latency to be very short.

And you either need no drops or you need an entire drop + retransmit cycle to fit within your latency. (Hmm, FEC could be used, I suppose — encode packets such that an entire lost packet could be recovered from the preceding packets plus the next couple packets.)

In the professional world, Dante seems to be taking over as the Audio over Ethernet solution.

I stream TV and music over the intertoobs all the time. It works fine. The bandwidth on a home network is much higher, so it should be fine.

The $10 Lightning to 3.5mm dongle for my iPhone has a microcontroller with RAM and an ADC, and the $20 lightning to Ethernet adapter has an Ethernet phy in it, so it's just a matter of someone getting funding, building it, and selling such a product. Latency would be a concern, but get a good firmware engineer on it.

It should be noted that the wifi version of this is sold by Sonos though I don't think they do surround sound for movie watching, but are focused on multi-room audio.

Sonos does surround audio with their sound bars, and you can connect them with Ethernet. There's also a hack to take the IKEA Sonos bookshelf speakers and connect them to different speakers, eg https://makezine.com/article/maker-news/hacking-the-sonos-ik...

There are wireless standards for this, no need for ethernet

https://www.wisatechnologies.com/speakers

I tried wireless speakers. They had poor fidelity and the music was often interrupted by static and dropouts.

The same thing happens with my Roku remote when I plug headphones into it.

No thanks.

Sonos works over WiFi just fine.

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