Hi everyone!

I already have a nice audio setup for my home office and my home theater, but I find myself carrying my big Soundcore Rave 3 speaker around for when I want loud music in a particular room (kitchen, garage, bedroom, etc.).

I don’t know it this particular speaker is considered “good”, but I personally like that it can easily fill up the room and has pretty good bass (listening to pretty much all kinds of music, but mainly electronic).

I would like to have this sound in 3-4+ additional rooms and am looking at options.

I thought about Sonos, but I find their speaker a bit on the expensive side for what they do.

Also, having a simple Bluetooth input available would be great for when I have guests over and they can just pair and be done with it.

I am comfortable with making the multi-room bit (probably with SBCs, amps and some Linux services) but would love to hear if anyone has found a good solution/setup for this use-case.

Budget-wise, I would like to stay well below 2k CAD ( 1250 EUR ?) but I’m open to any suggestion as I can see this as home improvement. I know at this price I could buy a bunch more of Rave3, but there would not be any multi-room features and I think it would look weird to have those speakers around…

Thanks!

  • eksb@programming.devEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    I have a Raspberry Pi running MPD with a HiFiBerry Digi+ Standard; the optical out goes to an amp in one room, and the coax goes to an amp in another room. (So those two always play the same thing.)

    For each additional room, I add another Raspberry Pi with access to the music on the primary Raspberry Pi via sshfs, running MPD, with either another HiFiBerry Digi+ or a USB DAC, and connect to the amplifier in that room. Each room added this way plays different music.

    If you wanted all the rooms to have the same thing playing, you could add multiple USB DACs to a single Raspberry Pi, each going somewhere else, MPD can output to all of them. It is probably better to have longer USB runs than longer analog audio runs. Or you can run the analog audio over shielded cat6.

    I have not tried adding a Bluetooth input to the Raspberry PI, but it seems like that would be possible with pipewire or jack.