School me on SONOS and other home streaming systems

I've got all my music and a bunch of movies on a NAS machine with Plex installed. I can either stream direct from my phone running Plex to Sonos, or use the Sonos app to stream direct from the Plex share.

problem re plex : another external agent involved.
also, i am not able to install the plex server s/w on my NAS drive, and nor would i if i wanted to.
i tried out the whole external plex/sonos team up thing a while back to navigate around the 65K library sonos limit as it was the suggested solution, and really battled with it.
it worked briefly (albeit with a lot of TLC), then something went hiccup, and that was it.
in the end i found a much easier internal solution to the 65K limit that means i can now quite easily disconnect from any of the external services, and just use my Connect for my internal set up only.
but i dont think thats currently possible.

fair game

I didn't realise Google had discontinued the Chromecast audio. That's madness.

When mine breaks, or when I get around to it, I'm going to get an Arcam miniBlink: https://www.arcam.co.uk/range/accessories/miniblink.htm

MP3s with a decent DAC

this is a total n00b question but is there consensus on the best way to wirelessly stream from a Mac desktop to a stereo system? and i just mean from a strictly functional point of view i.e. audio out from computer -- > to an input on the stereo.

A few months ago I picked up a squeezebox duet from the street where it was being thrown out - hooking it up to my nice old 2ch amp it's actually really great for bringing Spotify and Bandcamp into my more attentive listening space - and being able to control via Ipeng app on iphone is nifty. really impressed with it for a decade-old bit of kit

(wasn't meant as an answer to your question Tracer Hand but this is, in fact, exactly what I'm doing)

I have a Raspberry Pi lying around that I’ve always been meaning to do something with. Maybe this will be the year I buy a DAC card for it and just build the exact thing I want.

Tracer, I use a bluetooth audio receiver hooked into my amp. the brand is "esinkin" and it was about £25. it's about the size of a box of matches. It's pretty reliable. Sometimes it doesn't pick up the stream but i just switch it off and on and it's good again.

Just FYI Bluetooth is lossy, but the now-defunct Airport Express does exactly what you are asking and it’s a lossless 44/16 stream. The last gen (looks like a white Apple TV) has incredibly flat and well behaved audio characteristics (up there with audiophile CD players) and also optical out.

xp I don't think there is a consensus on the best way, or even a cheap/easy way, to stream audio from a Mac to a stereo system.

Macs can stream to AirPlay devices, but as far as I can tell Apple no longer sells any simple AirPlay gadgets with audio out ports. There are third-party products, but some of those are sketchy and others are expensive (some recent stereo receivers have AirPlay built in).

One solution would be to put a Chromecast Audio on the stereo system (CCAs still seem to be available from NewEgg and other suppliers). Some OS X applications can connect to a Chromecast directly (like Spotify) but you might need AirFoil or something similar to stream audio from other programs. I've tinkered with AirFoil on an old iMac and iirc it works well.

A Raspberry Pi can be configured as an AirPlay receiver, so that would be an even cheaper way to do it, albeit one requiring some labor-intensive set-up.

Used Airport Expresses are about $50 in the classifieds, and they work with all Mac audio (iTunes / Music as well as system sounds). Can be flaky if they're used to extend a wifi network but pretty solidly reliable for dedicated streaming.
Me, I use an old Mac Mini running iTunes controlled from the Apple Remote on my phone, and VNC screen sharing to access from other computers. My lossless collection fits on a 2TB external drive and I connect to a nice Vincent DAC using USB (or could do so with optical out).

CCAs still seem to be available from NewEgg

NewEgg is selling it for... $109!!

Aren't more and more amps, big and small, coming with DLNA/wifi streaming capabilities built-in? Surely there's a small, inexpensive wifi-capable amp that you can hook up a pair of speakers to.

AirPlay is definitely the way to go in an Apple ecosystem. I might give the raspberry pi thing a go. The decks, mixer speakers setup in my house could do with a better than bluetooth input but it’s not exactly HiFi

Sonos has caved: they’ll continue to update old devices (but not with new features) and will allow old devices to interoperate with new. And they’ve very sorry.

hmm .. not so sure they have caved.
from what i have read, you still cant have a set up with a mix of legacy and modern devices which is the biggest issue for most folks.

They say you can have that but it’s not exactly clear how, the way it’s written makes it sound like it will become two systems or something?

https://blog.sonos.com/en/a-letter-from-our-ceo/

We are working on a way to split your system so that modern products work together and get the latest features, while legacy products work together and remain in their current state.

exactly, you will probably have to seperate legacy and modern into 2 distinct set ups.
which is the same as the original advise.
this is why folks are pissed off.

i suspect that Sonos have yet to work out the exact details, so folks will just have to wait and see i guess.

I'm not seeing any mention of the "recycle" (bricking) feature in all the Sonos news now. Can't even run a line-in to them when that's done? Just vile. Like to see them go back on that one.

I didn't realise Google had discontinued the Chromecast audio. That's madness.

― Ngolo Cantwell (Chinaski)

idk, that's kind of google isn't it?

" MP3s with a decent DAC

one negates the other

― an incoherent crustacean (MatthewK)"

look, i'm not an audio nerd, is this really true? i've always took lossy degradation (which i don't really notice given a decent encode) and diminished sound quality from a poor DAC (which i do tend to notice) as entirely separate sorts of quality issues.

not true

about mp3 that is

Surely there's a small, inexpensive wifi-capable amp that you can hook up a pair of speakers to

one would think, but I'm not finding many products like this (with or without amplification) ... there's all kinds of cheap Bluetooth gear, but not much that uses wifi

the August WR320 is cheaper than a marked-up Chromecast Audio and looks like it does many of the same things

Just FYI Bluetooth is lossy

https://www.lifewire.com/what-to-know-about-bluetooth-3134591

^ more than I wanted to know about Bluetooth audio codecs

tl;dr newer Bluetooth devices handle compression better, but the Bluetooth signal is still compressed

in many cases it might not be possible to tell exactly what's happening, anyway:

Most Bluetooth audio products are built not by the company whose employees wear their brand, but by an original design manufacturer you've never heard of. And the Bluetooth receiver used in an audio product probably wasn't made by the ODM, but by yet another manufacturer. The more complex a digital product is, and if there are more engineers working on it, the more likely it is that no one knows everything about what's really going on inside the device. One format could easily be transcoded into another, and you'd never know it because almost no Bluetooth receiving device will tell you what the incoming format is.

This is on top of other factors affecting sound quality like the resolution of audio sources, the quality of DACs, the quality of speakers, the position of speakers, competing environmental noise, etc., etc.

this kind of shit would drive me crazy if I really wanted to optimize sound quality, but fortunately limitations of budget and hearing obviate that tendency

fwiw upthread, I am not trying to claim golden ear status and I'm sure a well encoded mp3 would sound far better through a well engineered DAC (the comment was facetious). But re compression algorithms, given the choice between lossless and lossy, in this age of massive storage and high bandwidth I can't fathom why anyone would accept the aesthetic / perceptual decisions made by some software engineer or consultant about what can and can't be heard, for the sake of a few MB of storage. All formats are flawed but deliberately throwing away part of the signal is just nuts to me. Give me a non-proprietary audio waveform that the artist approved as the final master, not some carefully constructed facsimile. If nothing else you can then encode it as needed for devices that need particular formats or have storage limitations. Bluetooth is the worst example for precisely the reasons stated above, plus with proprietary systems the people providing data about the compression are the same people who want you to buy the devices, so of course you're going to have their best assurances.

I feel like a chump for buying an ex-demo Sonos Connect just a few months back. I already had a Chromecast Audio but I don't recall being able to use it with Bandcamp or the NTS app, which I use quite heavily. The NTS archives are available on Mixcloud (which is supported) but I want the live streaming too.

Just picked up a second-hand Airport Express last gen. Thanks chaps. I had one before but it didn’t work that well - this one does. I don’t need multiroom so it’s exactly what I need.

Glad to hear it - that last gen is far better at streaming than the earlier models. I was a bit amazed by its measured quality, too -
https://www.kenrockwell.com/apple/airport-express-audio-quality-2014.htm
You can also do multiroom with them - just check as many output devices in iTunes / Music as you wish to stream to.

Digging around on Alibaba I found this

https://a.aliexpress.com/_s86sQP

Claims to be exactly what I want, a cheapo airplay receiver. Can’t vouch for the sound quality but at less than 40 Australian delivered seems worth a punt.

I've seen things like that on Amazon and the sound quality is said to be problematic.

I’ve rolled my own airplay receiver with a raspberry pi and a nice usb dac before. Already had the pi in the room for other nerd reasons, worked seamlessly

The recent revive prompted me to finally get a Chromecast Audio. Didn't realize until recently that it could output digital audio! Found one for just over retail and bought a miniTOSlink cable to go to this old receiver -- it sounds amazing, thanks! Does the grouping thing where it plays to multiple Chromecasts in sync work well?

I've heard it does, but I never use it myself.

Even if it's going for slightly more than it used to it's a good buy, the optical out is a great feature....IT WAS SUCH A GOOD DEVICE GOOGLE YOU ARE SO DUMB

I bought a Hifiberry DAC for $20, so my Raspberry Pi project is definitely happening.

A fool asks: with the digital output for the Chromecast Audio, would it need to be TOSlink to 3.5mm (ie, into the back of my amp)?

Chromecast audio can do analog or digital out from the same port. If you are going to an analog in 3.5mm on your amp, then you can use the regular 3.5-to-3.5 cord they include in the box. Or if you have digital optical in on your amp/DAC, they you can get this miniTOSlink (which is in the same shape as a 3.5mm normal plug) to TOSlink cord which fits in the optical port on an amp or DAC.

If I’m doing Airplay > Raspberry Pi > receiver, or Chromecast Audio > receiver, will putting a DAC between the Pi/Chromecast and receiver improve the sound at all?

chromecast has a dac, so you’d be doing double conversion. if you use the optical digital out, in theory you could put a dac in if your receiver doesn’t have optical

with the raspberry pi the dac you’d want would be either a usb soundcard or dac like the hifiberry ones that integrate directly with the board

if the Chromecast puts out a digital stream going into a DAC, it's not double conversion - that would be if the CC put out audio which was resampled (i.e. CC -> ADC -> DAC). It's using different converters to whatever cheap ones are in the Chromecast. For example I had a setup with an Airport Express going into analogue inputs on my receiver, and then I switched it to put out optical digital which was then converted in a much better standalone DAC. It looks the same from the "sending" end but the signal path is different and the conversion is better.

Does the grouping thing where it plays to multiple Chromecasts in sync work well?

yes, it's easy to set up and the sync is accurate

I use the optical out on the CCA into a DAC, works great

V happy with my Airport Express. Rock solid so far even when streaming video & downloading torrentz. And YouTube is in sync! The old AEs were like 1 second out iirc.

my turntable-> sonos woes might have been related to a mediocre pressing of a recent recording. I was doing an A/B comparison between the vinyl and a digital copy streamed directly in and it sounded crappy

the needle also might not have been clipped firmly into the stylus, so I can also blame human error!

So is there any point to this Sonos Radio?

This is kinda cool (Philip Glass made them a jingle): https://blog.sonos.com/en/sonic-branding-by-philip-glass/

Anyway, I just turned it on, the Indie Gold station, and it's playing Joy Division. We'll see.

This is... not good.