I've posted before about our whole-house music setup. Over 15 years ago we had a network of Logitech Squeezeboxes and then, when they were no longer supported, we moved over to Bluesound speakers dotted around the house.
We've enjoyed these and we love that our music follows us around the house, perfectly synchronised in every room. But recently, we've both felt that something is missing.
Involvement.
The sound quality from the speakers is fine. It's decent quality - although the technology is now several years old - and we've enjoyed being able to have music in every room.
Recently, however, we've become increasingly frustrated with the Bluesound app, without which the speakers cannot operate. All was well for a few years until we upgraded our wi-fi to a mesh system. This provided top speed connections across the house which I imagined would only help the Bluesound speakers as synchronised music files were shunted round the entire house.
Sadly, I was wrong. The app stopped being reliable in our setup and, despite numerous updates, it has never recovered. It would work fine for a time but then it would tell us we had no speakers, or no music, or both. Sometimes we could wait a few minutes and it would return, other times I'd have to reboot the Bluesound app and/or the wifi. And sometimes we'd just have to go without our music for a while.
I started to feel that we didn't own our music system, relying on an flaky service that could deny us our listening pleasure without notice. And the spontaneity of putting on our favourite tracks evaporated.
Something had to be done.