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Home Audio Technology Stack
Whole home audio routing with off-the-shelf equipment.
Playing music out of speakers has become much simpler recently thanks to consumer smart speakers like the Echo and Sonos One. But these products only allow playing from one speaker at a time, and only from one audio source.
For a home automation enthusiast, playing audio throughout the house means routing audio from any source to any destination. Even more, it is imperative to overlay these signals so that I can hear the delivery driver through my doorbell while music is playing! This is a non-trivial problem, but with a little bit of custom software (hello EAR!) and some off-the-shelf hardware, it can be achieved.
The simple hardware list looks like this:
This equipment will produce crisp, powerful audio to 12 different channels/speakers, and can be expanded by adding more amplifiers.
The next step is routing audio with Einstein Audio Router through a connected host computer. The software is still in an early alpha state, but a future article will cover configuring simple setups.