Real multi room, multi input-multi output audio system

Help and Support Help
1

I’m just few weeks before cabling my new house with all possible smart home solutions (lights, doors, roller shutters, heating, cooling etc). Since few weeks I’m looking for a solution for multi room - multi source audio system. The problem is it should be scalable, the best would be to send audio over LAN network (all house will be wired with gigabit LAN). So before putting much to much cables for sources and speakers I was trying to find solution to avoid unnecessary cabling all the house with even more cables.

I would like to be able, to use my audio system either independent or partially/fully synchronized. I would like to keep all the possible audio zones independent, at least it would be:

  • living room
  • kitchen
  • bathroom 1
  • bathroom 2
  • terrace
    maybe also later
  • fitness room
  • office

Because you never know the future ideas, this is why I would like to be able to keep the system scalable. I like the feeling when every single door is open, you move over the house and hear everywhere the same music. At the moment in my old flat it is just possible if I turn the same analog radio station in each room. But it would be the best to be able select any source for any room/zone, like:

  • TV
  • Spotify/webradio
  • own music collection
  • any AUX device - like lokal Radio reciver, CD player, turntable, computer etc
  • bluetooth device - smartphone, laptop

I was trying to put some schematic together, how it could look like:

I was trying to find any working solution, but there is a lot of informations about low latency audio streaming (logitech media server, trx streamer, gstreamer etc), but there is no information about how to get it done. I belive there must be any working solution that may apply to my requirements. I already install volumio on my spare raspberry pi, but at the moment I don’t have other one, to try multiroom possibility. The problem I see on volumio is, how to connect an external audio input, like AUX and stream it to other volumio’s player?

If this would be possible with volumio - what about the latency? Would it be possible to watch TV/Movie and play the sound through volumio without feeling the delay in Audio?

Thank you in advance for your help! :wink:

2

I suspect that are wanting something that is either not available, or is very expensive :wink:.

Volumio will happily do synchronised mulltiroom play via the ‘Snapcast’ plugin. You need to carefully read the documentation to make sure it does everything that you want though (I vaguely remember problems with spotify or spotify connect, but that was some time ago). The ‘aux’ input and distribution, as you say, is just not going to happen with Volumio (or anything else that I am aware of) any time soon.

Latency seems to be well sorted by my experience of ‘Snapcast’ … I was very impressed.

Whether your home LAN will be able to provide the throughput is down to your design.

3

Thank you for the advice, I have some problem with snapcast, but I hope it will work soon :wink:

What about Logitech Media Server - is this one comparable with snapcast? It is hard to find what are the differences between Snapcast and LMS…

4

I can give you a handsup för google chromecast audio with a warning you do need an amplifier or active speakers in every room.
chromecast audio also have a delay control so you can get an perfect match to the sound.

or if you choose volumio on raspberry pi you also need amplifier or active speaker.