My Hybrid Setup: Roon + Bluesound + Home Assistant

Audio Gear Talk BluOS: NAD & Bluesound
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Here’s how I’ve combined Roon, Bluesound, and Home Assistant to cover all my listening needs:

  • Endpoints: Everything is Roon Ready except my Buchardt A500 SE and Wrensilva console, which I’ve made Roon Ready using a NAD C658 and Node N132.
  • Inputs: SiriusXM (via BluOS), Wrensilva turntable (via Node N132), Wiim Mini for stable AirPlay (into the Hub), and TV audio (via HDMI ARC into the Hub).
  • Grouping: For whole-house playback, I stream to the Node N132 in Roon and then group speakers in the Bluesound app—much more stable than grouping inside Roon or AirPlay.
  • Control: All devices are integrated into Home Assistant, with Symfonisk Gen 2 remotes in each room for volume, and a dedicated button on the Wrensilva that instantly groups every Bluesound endpoint.

This way I get the best of Roon (library, metadata, DSP), the best of Bluesound (inputs + grouping), and seamless whole-home control via Home Assistant. The diagram shows how it all fits together.

Sound Setup
Sound Setup1920×2485 134 KB

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Have you had any luck using Home Assistant to set the audio playback?
I can’t get it to reliably reference Roon’s audio library.
It might for a day or two, but then won’t be able to load it for things like automations.

Also: what issues were you running into with Roon’s grouping that Bluesound’s grouping solved?

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I use HA mostly for scripts to trigger playlists. I’m not looking for functionality to play a specific song. One trick I use is I have a playlist with only one song in it with Roon radio set for the list after the last song. This in essence gives me the equivalent of “play some jazz” as a command.

I change the song based on my mood and trigger the script using Symfonisk remotes in each room.

As far as grouping. The three Flex2i’s are on wi-fi, the rest are etherner. Roon can get kinda wonky when playing to all 8 zones whereas Bluesound is rock solid.

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Thanks for following up.
My HA issues were related to the integration setting media IDs instead of using static pathing.
It’s a weird issue described in the github repo that’s still active in the current integration, but can be manually corrected.

I’m interested in the Bluesound grouping, though I noticed that limits the ability to manage sound in the Roon app. It sounds like you’re doing that via HA?