Hi,
Helping a friend design a system for his new house. it will have 12 sets of regular wired in-ceiling speakers throughout multiple rooms in the house all wired to a media closet in the basement. He wants to be able to stream any audio from an iphone or android phone to any set of speakers, or groupings of multiple speakers anywhere in the house. For example, coming in from work halfway through a podcast on his android phone, he wants to be able to select the speakers in his bathroom and continue the podcast in the shower exactly where he left off. the whole house has wifi. Does Roon do this? If so, What does a full system look like (device in the media closet that will connect to all the speakers, a roon device that connects to that)?
No it doesn’t currently. To do that you need a system that accepts inputs from airplay for Apple and chromecast for Android and can route to any room. Or you have a compatible AirPlay Chromecast wireless speaker in each Room. Roon is self contained it doesn’t pick up streams from other devices , although there is something called Roon Relay but it’s not fully been revealed what this will do. Currently it’s used on certain Turntables to route their output to Roon enabled endpoints but no other details have been announced yet. Personally I would avoid Roon for such a setup it would cause more headaches for the user.
Something like this is more suitable.
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Thank you!
I do wonder sometimes if idea of a house full of ceiling speakers wired back to a basement closet is now a slightly dated approach.
In a time before WiFi networks and smart speakers, wiring everything back to a single rack in the basement used to be the only way to do this. It’s what the rock stars had on MTV cribs, innit. But the truth is is that ceiling speaker aren’t that great for sound quality, it’s not where our ears point out.
Nowadays you can mix-and-match ie. a proper HIFI setup in the lounge, a pair of stereo smart speakers in study, a standalone smart speaker in the bathroom, a radio alarm clock in the bedroom and a couple of outdoor speakers on the patio. None of these need to be wired back to a central rack as long as they (or their attached streamer / amps) have network or WiFI access.
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That said if your friend is dead set on ceiling speakers in every room and the basement closet is the best place for the streamers/amps, then you’ll need a streaming distribution amp like the unit CrystalGipsy linked to above or a combination of separate muti-zone streamers and multi-zone amps.
Marantz also make a nice rack-mountable 8 channel streaming amplifier. But I don’t think it has Chromecast support, which might be a dealbreaker if your friend is an Android user, but mentioning it here in case others are searching this thread in future.
Another more cost-effective option would be to fill a rack with WiiM Streaming Amps using 19" rack shelves which support both Airplay and Chromecast, although you’d need one WiiM per zone.
As you can see there are multiple routes here…
What I woudl say is don’t jerry-rig or cut-corners on a setup like this, it’s bad enough having to power-cycle a single device in your lounge, you don’t want to be running down to the basement to reboot something every time you want to play music.
I know nothing about your or your friends backgrounds, so apologies if this sounds out of place. But given the cost of the equipment is likely to run into the multiple thousands, he might be better off getting someone in who does these kind of custom installs day in / day out and can install the speakers and route all the cables to a professional standard and support the system long term.
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In terms of Roon itself, it has great multi-room support and seamlessly allows you to transfer or group music across zones. You can also switch back and forth between different devices to control playback.
But as CG states above. Roon is a bit of a walled-garden and only handles audio originating from within its own eco-system ie. Qobuz/Tidal, Internet radio or your local FLAC files. You can’t currently, or at least not easily, use its EQ and muti-room features with 3rd party sources like a Podcast app on your phone. Instead you have to fall back to using AirPlay or Chromecast (outside of Roon) in those cases.
That said in terms of the total costs of hardware adding a Nucleus One to the rack is likely small-change, so if your friend does has a large music collection it certainly has a place. It’s just not the solution to the Podcast part.
FWIW If I had a dozen sets of ceiling speakers I’d certainly be using Roon for background music and internet radio — not least because I wouldn’t want my phone in the loop, which is the case when using Airplay. But I’d also make sure my most important zones also supported Airplay (or Chromecast) as a fallback — so I could listen to Podcasts and 3rd party audio apps like Soundcloud and archived radio shows.
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Another consideration is whether you want this system to tie into a wider home automation system like Creston / Control 4 / etc. In which case you probably want to be looking at proper cutom install products.
The NAD CI-720 which is effectively a Bluesound Node (running BlueOS) for the CI market ie. better thermal management than regular consumer units, can be mounted 6 up in a single 19" rack giving you 12 channels per rack shelf. It also has a subwoofer output, which can be useful to counteract the reduced bass you’ll get from ceiling mounted speakers. Roon is officially supported if you wanted to add it to the mix.
This.
I regret the ceiling speakers I have now, except in the kitchen. Even there, a Sonos Five would probably be better. It all feels very 1980’s.
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I have a house with ceiling speakers in the main rooms downstairs, outside speaker zones which I run from a couple of Marantz M4s. In other areas I have HEOS speakers.
Before the ROON ready designation I relied on my RHEOS app but now often use the native ROON integration unless I am pairing with older non ROON ready HEOS players.
I love the flexibility and it all works very well.