AddOn Audio Pro Speakers - anyone using these?

Hi. Anyone have any experience of these?
They seem to get nothing but excellent reviews, not the highest of fi but more than adequate for localised audio endpoints for the kitchen etc.

Was considering a T3 battery one for portability and a T10 for the kitchen and “gluing” a chromecast audio to the rear for Roon goodness.

Of course if AddOn would imbue the C series (wifi) with the roonspeakers thing … it could be even tidier but as they are pursuing their own multiroon concept i guess it may not be top of their list.

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https://www.audiopro.com might help people who are interested to have a look :slight_smile:

Well I went ahead and bought the T10 model, stuck a chromecast audio on the back and damn what an excellent little speaker it is for the money. And superb with Roon via the Chromecast Audio too.
Well done to Audio Pro for a very sensibly engineered unit clearly with the money spent in the right places.
(To be clear no vested interest here than to pass on the experience).

Will definitely be looking at the T3 which is a smaller battery powered version, equally well reviewed, for a portable.
I did inquire Add On about Roon support for the wifi C series but their support replied saying they weren’t looking at it.
Perhaps somebody at Roon could encourage that!

I have a C10 with a RasPi for Roon connectivity glued to the back of it.

I’m not entirely sure why, and have asked Addon about it, but mine seems to like trying to connect to Amazon, Akamai, Alibaba and Yahoo, despite no external services being configured (i wanted access to the tone settings is why it was allowed to connect to WiFi).

I bought a C5 for my wife when they had a special offer… great little speaker. I expecially like the way I can program a physical button to play a specific radio station (without needing iphone to start play). Not using it with Roon, but would be great if they added it.

Hopefully Chromecast support is in the works for coming Audio Pro products. Nevertheless, RPI is a great solution for nearly every speaker that has an AUX input.

For the curious, here’s what the connections log of an Addon C10 speaker with no external services enabled looks like. The device was only connected on the network to allow for tone control access.

NMap reveals something like 30 open ports, and there’s DNS calls for s000.linkplay.com, even though Addon isn’t on the list of Linkplay customers. It returns a MAC range belonging to LinkSprite for the Wifi module.

According to their support guy, the only way to prevent this behaviour is to not connect the speaker to your network at all. There is no way that I could find to disable WiFi, let alone get granular control over the network services offered.

I’m no IT or infosec specialist, but out of principle, I’d make sure to quarantine the hell out of that thing if you’re going to let it connect at all. Seat of the pants feelings from looking at all the open ports, and the somewhat nonchalant attitude Addon support had when prompted is that this thing is a dumpster fire ready to be hurled at your basement NAS. I’d be curious what someone with actual knowledge and skills could get that thing to do.

So while this all isn’t anything truly alarming, it is bothersome, in the sense that you absolutely cannot dumb this thing down and stop it from connecting all over the place: if you don’t connect it to your network, you’re, at worst, good for the open network that would allow your neighbours to blast music, at best good for something that’ll add a WiFi network you can’t rename and pollute the signal for your other devices (you could probably reconfigure it and add a password to protect it from your neighbours is how you’d get it to only pollute your WiFi neighbourhood). If you do connect it to your network, you’re getting something that pings alibaba, amazon, akamai and yahoo absolutely non-stop, so you’re going to have to block that if you don’t want to pay for the privilege of getting them whatever the hell they’re getting off of those things (which may be nothing at all).

Consider yourselves warned: if you want to make one of these into a Roon endpoint, get the T10, or get something from a different brand, do the tone control through Roon’s DSP, and connect it using a well-maintained third party device (say, a RaspBerry running Ropieee).

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Just got the AudioPro T4 and I am using it with an Allo Boss 1.2. It sounds fantastic. The T4 is a plain bluetooth speaker + aux in which I am using with the Allo. It has auto on / off (input signal sensing) so you can set it and forget it. Very punchy sound and quite well balanced as long as it is not jammed against a wall (in which case the bass overpowers a bit). You can of course use Roon’s wonderful DSP to fix this to your liking.
To my ears this combo sounds a lot better than a Sonos play 5 and costs less. It is not as neat as a Sonos of course (2 boxes + 1 PSU + 3 cables).

I’ve since returned that thing, but if someone with a mac has one around, maybe running Princeton’s IoT inspector could be of use to yourselves or others (the why is here).

Considering the C5 but have a question regarding the Airplay support. Will it work with Roon if I enable Airplay in the Roon settings? Anything I need to consider? I am no Apple guy hence my questions :thinking:

Should work fine out the box - the A10 does for me. You’re just limited to Airplay resolution (?48Khz) if you go that route.

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Thanks! Airplay quality will probably be just fine for my teenagers. How do you find the A10? Good enough and sufficient bass for rap music in a 15 sqm room?

I’ll be honest, I’ve only listened to it a couple of times fairly briefly with Roon to test, as was bought for a present. I was actually a little underwhelmed, in particular the bass/upper bass, but I didn’t do any playing around with positioning/PEQ, nor did I try with an alternative input (e.g. RPi DAC HAT). As everyone else seems to rate it highly, I was surprised by this so would want to do more before drawing any conclusions. FYI the context here is in comparison to a Bluesound Flex or UE Roll 2.

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Thanks again. I have been considering the Flex since I already have a Powernode 2 running in my office.

Thought I’d stick to one brand but I can get two A10s for a price lower than one Flex. My daughters also think the A10´s cylinder shape is a lot cooler compared to the Flex box.

The kids don’t care that much about sound quality, which is good for my wallet. It could be the other way around, I suppose.

That’s exactly my use case too…and open box they can be had for a very good price!

Hi.
I have a Naim Unity Atom which I am now using with Roon.
I also have a Audio Pro Add-on T3 which I love. Use it at work, in the garden. Great sound and the battery lasts for ages.

You guys above seem to be able to use the AUX input to stream to speakers that are not Roon ready.
How do you achieve this and will the music Sync when using multiroom?

Cheers!

If I’m not mistaken, and as long as your Unity Atom is V2 and thus RoonReady, then you’ve got a reasonably cheap way to do this through a RaspBerry with a DAC board, preferably running Ropieee. There’s a list of compatible DAC boards here, and a Pi/Dac/case combo should be sub $100 all-in, maybe a bit more if your donation to @spockfish is appropriately generous. You tape the RaspBerry to the back of your T3, connect it with RCA-to-minijack, and power it via the USB out. The one thing to be mindful about is to not exceed the amperage specs on the T3’s USB out, so do keep it simple and don’t get something that draws unnecessary power. 1 amp or 5w, all-in, is really as high as you should aim for.

A typical USB connection is often rated for only about 500mA some that are designed for device charging can provide more. Most RPi need ideally 2.5A

Nice idea with regards to the usb output of the T3.
I tend to just connect my phone to the T3 now an just use Roon via Bluetooth.
However I also have a Pi with Riopppieeee with a dragonfly red and that also works well.
Cheer

The one on the T3 is 1000mA, hence my comment. A Pi Zero with the lower-end HifiBerry board fits the envelope. Not having Ethernet (and DHCP) was a bit of a PITA as far as setup was concerned, though.

It works fine if you’re using an external brick, but see my comment on power draw if you’re going to be powering off the built-in USB.

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