The state of multi-room audio is đź’©.
Sonos & Heos are expensive and don’t offer every type of speaker connectivity situation common in existing homes.
AirPlay 2 is good option, but vendor locks to Apple ecosystem. Source device cannot get too far away from target device, just like Bluetooth. Spotify does not support AirPlay 2 multi-room.
There is a huge opportunity for relegated home audio players and a powerful outsider like Spotify to define an open industry standard and rally.
@tom $700 a pop for connecting regular speakers is 🤑. I'm looking more for a $99 dongle.
@jeremiahlee might be misunderstanding but if you want to connect passive speakers you're going to need an amp and good ones are never cheap.
@tom One example: I have fine powered speakers (not "smart") built into the bathroom ceiling. I can connect any source to them and would prefer to not to run speaker wire across my home to connect to a new central system.
@jeremiahlee Local audio streaming suffers from “Bluetooth being good enough for 90% of use cases”. Furthering vendor-lock-ins seems to be the only motivator driving innovation in this space.
@jeremiahlee Sonos is great, although agreed it would be _really_ amazing if it was an open standard. They have the Amp product for connecting to regular speakers.