Outside the ecosystem
Can you mix brands to create a multiroom system?
One thing about ecosystems is that they are, er, ecosystems. There’s that ‘lock-in’ factor where once you’ve bought that first couple of wireless speakers, you’ve tied yourself into that brand’s proprietary method of grouping and playing party music throughout the home. Then when budget allows and you’re ready to add music to an additional room, or put a streaming soundbar in your lounge, you’re kinda stuck with the same system, even if someone else’s soundbar is significantly superior.
For a while, it looked like third-party platforms could be the answer. DTS PlayFi was fast gathering steam a few years ago, with a good many manufacturers using the technology rather than develop their own, and in the process enabling their users to add any other DTS PlayFi unit to the home, whatever the brand. Some significant hi-fi companies of distinction signed up: currently listed on the playfi.com website are Anthem, Arcam, Audiolab, Definitive Technology, Integra, Klipsch, MartinLogan, McIntosh, Paradigm, Pioneer, Polk, Quad, Rotel and Sonus faber among others. But this list is rather deceptive: some of these used the platform in only a few products some years ago, others are on the way out, such as the Definitive Technology W system, and still others have kept it aboard but only really as a legacy option — Pioneer’s latest AV receivers, for example, now lead with FlareConnect for multiroom audio, but also have Chromecast and AirPlay 2 built-in, and they work with Alexa and Google Assistant, Roon, and even Sonos. DTS Play-Fi is far down the list of options.
Instead the two technologies that have really taken over the commoditisation of streaming audio are Google’s Chromecast and Apple’s AirPlay 2.
Chromecast
Chromecast’s biggest strength over AirPlay 2 is that it’s open to use by both iOS and Android mobiles, whereas AirPlay only works natively with Apple devices as the source.
With Google’s own speakers or with other products that have Chromecast inside, you can create permanent groups inside the Google Home app, including groups that cross over each other, so you could have everything on one floor set up as a group, but also define another group which includes everything in the house.
You’ll often see written that Chromecast has the limitation that you can’t use two different groups at once, as you can in a proper multiroom system. But you can; it’s just not as seamlessly simple as on many of the multiroom systems here. In the screenshot shown below we have created two speaker groups: one for two products in our lounge, the other for two products in our bedroom. We were able to send Spotify to one group, and TuneIn radio to the other without problems. But we noted that we couldn’t add our TV to the group, despite it being an Android TV. And while the Chromecast Audio dongle (above) was the perfect thing to plug into your old hi-fi products to bring them into the streaming world, Google decided to mothball that wonderfully cheap product last year (perhaps it was adversely affecting their licensing income). You can still pick one up if you’re lucky (we note eBay prices are rising!), or could, rather inelegantly, use a video Chromecast with an HDMI-to-audio splitter.
So while Google Home and Chromecast can certainly work with compatible products as a multiroom system, we think many users will struggle doing more than separately casting to individual Chromecastenabled speakers.