Kickstarter cup-rattling, light-dimming Internet of Stuff upstart takes on Sonos, Bose Kickstarter-funded Musaic hopes to outsmart Sonos and beat Bose with speakers that play higher fidelity music across normal Wi-Fi, support Bluetooth and integrate with home automation lighting and security products. Wi-Fi is becoming the smart home network. Sonos, the streaming speaker king, takes advantage of that but …
a glorified ghetto-blaster. They promise a player to suit every room. In reality that's a choice of two boxes with the diddy speakers either 12 or 14 inches apart.
I second petur in mourning the Squeezebox. I'll need one of those when I buy a pair of Volti Vittoras with my lottery winnings ...
How long before some snake oil salesman markets a system which "maintains width, speed, flavour, airiness and general bumfluff" through sending left and right channels through complete seperate wifi links on different frequencies with gold plated oxygen free antennas? I can't wait.
You can get a Sonos box to drive your own speakers directly and another
which will feed into your own amp.
I have the latter feeding into the aux input of my Yamaha digital piano.
Also some play 3 speakers in another room.
Maybe not hifi but easily good enough sound for my needs.
Surely powerline adapters with built in audio decoders and a decent spec power amp would be a much better proposition - hook up your own speakers, minimize interference (especially when living in blocks of flats where the wifi contention is terrible). A simple bridge/codec that can take multiple inputs with a simple web interface optimized for small devices and you've got the possibility of truly distributed audio wherever there's a power socket. Can't be too much to ask..... (no more surround sound speaker cable hell)
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