Quote:
Originally Posted by TorqueDog
Do you want all the rooms playing the same thing, or do you want the rooms to be individually controlled?
|
Ideally, you'd think the technology should be able to do either of these things as the situation warrants.. It's not like it's a novel concept to send sound to different speaker groups (rear, front, center) or all of them at once.
Quote:
|
Individually controlled means separate amps and Echos / Google Home Minis, but it's more complex to get them all playing the same thing on a whim if you do want that.
|
All the Amazon devices are linked together, so the one in the living room can turn on the speakers (or the lights, or whatever) in the bedroom. It's all one big unit with different "groups" of devices organized by room. I can command it to turn on my bedside lamp, or all of my bedroom lights, regardless of where in the house I am. The only thing that's linked to one specific Echo device is Fire TV (only one echo can be connected to one Fire TV stick at a time, which is fine, because I have five Echo devices and only 2 Fire TV sticks).
You can easily bridge them so they're all playing the same music in every room through the Echo speakers themselves, but because they're pretty crappy speakers, that's not good for much. You can also tie them to bluetooth speakers, but there are two problems there - first, that only really works in my bedroom where I have an Echo Spot tied into my TV surround system, and second, bluetooth speakers aren't "always on". They shut themselves off after a while and Alexa doesn't have the ability to power them on.
Hence why I want to tie the Echo devices into the ceiling speakers through some sort of central hub that said Echo devices can control.