Room Video Amp; Music Player

[Kipa Crawn]

Iam considering Sonos set up for my new home. In my new home I have great room , dining room and kitchen all in one straight line. The kitchen is far from the great room wall where my TV hangs. I have prewire set up for rear channels in great room and two speakers in kitchen. So this is what I intend to do and please let me know if this is possible. I will have a Sonos Arc under the tv to act as 3 channels. I will have a Sonos Amp connected to Sonos Arc. This Amp should power the two rear channels in the great room to create a 5 channel surround in great room. Now since the kitchen is a bit far, I want the same Amp to also power the two in-ceiling speakers in my kitchen with the same audio as great room but as a separate room. I do not want to create a 7 channel system, what I want to create is a 5 channel system in the great room and a two channel system in my kitchen playing the same audio. Is this possible? Are there any recommendations or considerations for this set up? Would I need any more additional accessories do achieve this set up?

Thanks for the suggestion. Say if I am ok with just a sound bar in living room (without any rear speakers), can I connect a single amp to sound bar(wirelessly) and use this amp as a zone playing the same audio in kitchen?

For your proposed setup there will be a time alignment issue. In order to facilitate working around transient network issues without audio loss, a 30ms latency is injected into the audio stream from the TV. In terms of lip sync, this is acceptable for most viewers. For players Grouped together the latency is 75ms.

There is a sort of workaround that is acceptable to some and not acceptable to others. You can adjust the lip sync of the surround system to better match the latency of the Group. Obviously this will impact the TV viewing lip sync.

I have the same issue and it only happens to one of my speakers. I have three Sonos ones and the one that is not part of a stereo pair cuts in and out for no reason. I have great Wi-Fi connection all throughout my house. Frustrating.

We've had our Sonos system for 6 years and started having problems with a few zones intermittently cutting out while the app on our iPad shows the music is still playing. This problem started a few months ago and our audio tech has made sure our software is up to date but the problem still persists.

i wonder if the connection issues are a result of Sonos software updates ,which may be designed for newer devices but are making older units malfunction? This seems to have happened recently so I doubt that we are all having WiFi or connection issues.

Recently started having this issue where particular rooms with the Playbar and Sonos ones will drop audio will the other rooms will keep playing. I submitted the system diagnostics and contacted support.

there is an issue with the Family Room, specifically the Playbar, that is not connecting properly to your WiFi. The issue is when it request for the WiFi channels on your WiFi and it is unable to pick the required information on the system, so it ends up affecting the system and causing this audio issues. We are aware of this issue and are investigating. At this time, rebooting this device is the best way to alleviate this issue. We do not currently have an ETA.

For a long time I have been trying to figure out what I need for a multi-room music set up. Most of the products to buy are a significant cost per room for me considering I all ready have the speakers/amplifiers in place. Spurred on by my children learning about the Raspberry Pi at their fantastic Junior School, St Begh's with their teacher Mr Sharkey, I decided to show them that we can build 'stuff' at home that can be just as good (hopefully) as products you can buy in shops.

The range that started it all, Sonos, offers the Connect as a means of streaming to existing systems. Priced at 280 this would come to 1,120 in total, an investment. However, it is widely regarded as the best/most useable multi-room system. It can also stream Spotify amongst just about every other service available.

Denon produce the HEOS LINK which looks to me to offer the most adaptability in terms of connections and features and should I come into some money is probably the one I would buy (after I listened to them all!). It is 300 per room so 1,200 for the house and out of my range at the moment.

So back to the project - put together a 4 room music system to feed my existing equipment, play my music collection from our media server, stream from Spotify and be easy to use and control ........ and sound as good as it can for the target price of 100.

If you're just discovering digital music on your computer I would recommend The Well-Tempered Computer as a place to start, the people at Xiph.org as a place to finish and the forums of What Hi-Fi as place to hang around in between. If you do feel you need a voice of experience on all things audio then always read what Andrew Everard has to say (alternatively if you need the ultimate gods of audio testing and have a degree in electronics to understand them, then both Ken Rockwell and NwAvGuy tie closely at the top).

I have done much listening to music on my laptop including a lengthy trial of the new non compressed (16-bit 44.1kHz CD Quality) service Tidal, ripped CD's using various formats and bitrates including lossless. The lower bitrates I can tell the difference, especially if not variable. Once at 320 kbps variable in both mp3 and ogg it gets tricky for me. I think I can tell a very very small difference in some tracks in some places using my headphones but not enough for me to warrant a change up from streaming from Spotify Premium at the moment. Depending on your equipment and/or your ears you may be able to, I have absolutely no problem with that at all. So for this project, for me, as long as the system can distribute up to CD quality audio I'll be happy.

So first up I tried to explain to the kids what we were trying to come up with, for the most part I think they got it. Our youngest even wanted to draw out a plan. So with a bit of help we end up with the above.

I read a lot about the Raspberry Pi and power supplies, the short version is I decided to order a B+ and a supply that everyone says works and supplies enough current for USB devices to be stable. Secondly on the issue of synchronisation I read a lot about clocks and servers and streams and decided to bypass the lot by using a USB DAC that also transmits to its own receiver's. Although this felt a bit like cheating it made the project hardware very simple indeed. Finally I looked through the all the music player software available on the Pi and settled on the one that seemed to have the best USB DAC compatibility - Pi MusicBox.

I came across the Creative Sound Blaster Wireless Transmitter (sometimes called Creative Sound Blaster for iTunes Wireless Music Streamer) a while back whilst it was still available from them direct but didn't buy one until I started to look at this project. By then it was discontinued direct but I found some on Amazon, at the time they were slightly cheaper than they are now, so be aware this may cost slightly more than I paid below. Because I found that this was exactly what I was after I stopped looking for alternatives, I think Audioengine do one called the W3 and if you wanted to stream in high resolution you could look to use the D2 but the cost increase is significant. Audio Pro have the WFD200 which I think does the same thing. FiiO, who I have a lot of faith in after owning and loving their D3 DAC and E07K/E09K Desktop DAC and Headphone Amplifier combination, do their Wireless W1 system, though I can't find it for sale in Europe. The FiiO website is well worth a look for their literal translations from Chinese marketing phrases straight in to English - 'Brings Limitless Splendidness' is how they describe most things. Properly good and good value products though. Maplin do one and I'd guess Lindy will do one, they do most things.

This assumes that you already have a wired Ethernet point available to the Pi where it is going to be used at to provide network and internet access. I haven't gone into the Wi-Fi thing with the Pi but I am sure it is possible.

The Raspberry Pi B+ arrived and was unpacked and fitted in its case within two minutes, no problems. I had decided that I wanted to have the option of moving the USB transmitter around on the surface it was going to live on so I mounted it on a vertical USB extension I had lying around. I have tested it directly in to the Pi and it works just the same. The power supply was plugged in and hidden away, but I stopped short at this point of powering it up. Last thing was to attach the network cable from a router I have in the room it was being used in. Reading on most of the forums the Raspberry Pi works with certain WiFi adapters so if you haven't got a wired Ethernet point handy you can use one of those.

Next up all the receiver's were unpacked and installed in their various locations, they all came with power supplies and cables. The dc power supplies were quite interesting, the UK 3 Pin heads can be mounted either up or down depending on whether you're plugging it in to the left or right of a double socket. I used a mixture of audio RCA cables and 3.5mm stereo jack leads to connect the receiver's to my kit depending on the sockets available. The Creative receiver's come with both types of output connector. I had one into a pair of Creative T20 powered speakers I have in the kitchen. For a cheap set of speakers that allow you to have a true separate stereo sound source these are great. The next one I plugged in to the Yamaha Home Cinema Amplifier in the living room. One was added to my FiiO Headphone Amplifier in the study which also plays through a pair of Focal XS Book powered speakers. Finally one was added to a small Philips docking speaker in the bedroom. All connected and ready to go. Once powered up the green 'connect' switch lights up on the back and the white indicator on each of the units flashes to indicate waiting to receive a signal. Most of the instructions for these assume you're using them with a PC but they seemed to know what they were doing anyway. The software and remote controls supplied were only applicable to PC use so not needed here.

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