Home sound solution with good W.A.F.

[depontius]

Here's the dream system, for my wife. In one spot in the house, have some sort of "classic-style" music player. By classic-style I mean a CD tray, a tuning knob, selector, etc - all of those things something of a technophobe grew up with. Then take the audio output of that music player and pipe it around the house with wifi, so speakers could be placed in various rooms, or carried from room to room. No phones, no tablets, no apps.

I see two parts to this. The first part is something with audio inputs, perhaps something like a Raspberry Pi that pipes audio inputs to a dlna server and wifi. The second part would be dlna-capable speakers that can select the aforementioned server. Is this reasonable? Does this exist already, or do the parts to build it exist?

My problem is that everything made seems to want to belong to a "system" of some sort, and they want you to buy all sorts of pieces from the same manufacturer. The marketing blurbs almost tell you that what I want can be done, but not quite. I found a Samsung M7-related thing that might be able to act as my audio-to-dlna, except that that's a very minor and not-featured part of what it can do, and the rest of its unneeded-by-me capabilities make it quite expensive. I've found dlna software, but it all seems to want to stream muslic libraries, not an audio device. For that matter, I'm not sure it dlna-capable speakers really stream generic dlna, or dlna-from-their-brand.

(The Logitech UE SmartRadio I got my wife for Christmas two years ago is of course obsolete, discontinued, and has no follow-on. So much for putting my trust in one manuracturer for a complete solution.)
_________________
.sigs waste space and bandwidth

[SDNick484]

Are you familiar with Sonos? This is basically their niche. Their offering may fall into what you consider a "system", but they've been around a long time (for a tech company) and this is their core competency (so in other words, short of them closing shop, they'll always offer products in this space). The downside to Sonos is that they're not cheap. Assuming you already have a physical stereo with all the inputs you want (i.e. CD, turning knob, etc.), you could grab the Sonos Connect and some Sonos Wireless Speakers. Their system is typically operated with their remote hardware (or software these days) so you'd still need a way to identify which speaker(s) should be playing without using their app. Fortunately, they do have an unofficial API, so it should be possible to rig a physical interface (using something like a Raspberry Pi) which would send the commands to enable the speakers.

Anyways, this is just one approach you could take. I don't have a Sonos myself (I'm a big user of MPD for a similar purpose though), but I have less tech savvy friends who use Sonos and swear by them (although none of these folks are so technophobic as to not use an app). I did use Logitech's Squeezebox software (the precursor to SmartRadio) back in the early 2000's, but have switched to MPD about 5-6 years ago and haven't looked back (I didn't even know it was rebranded and discontinued).

Personally, I've never had much good luck with UPNP/DLNA, but I wish you well. In theory, pulseaudio (which I hate) can serve a similar purpose.

Anyways, good luck. If you do make something, please post back as I'm curious what route you'd take. I'm trying to thing of how this could be done with MPD, but I can see some roadblocks as MPD somewhat assumes your library is digitized and tagged.

[depontius]

We were out shopping and got a Sonos pitch, and it looked impressive. But I was reading some reviews, and a frequent complaint was that Sonos would put out software updates without warning, and with some of those updates there were significant functionality changes. My wife isn't fond of software updates, she tends to think that at some point things should be "done" and be stable. That's part of why she likes knobs.

Samsung has a gizmo that does the same thing as Sonos Connect, (same price, too) though I haven't seen it for sale at Amazon or Newegg, just direct from Samsung. Seems awfully pricey for streaming a pair of RCA jacks, but I'm sure that like the Samsung, the Sonos Connect does more than just that - more functions that I don't particularly need or want.
_________________
.sigs waste space and bandwidth

[SDNick484]

Interesting, I hadn't heard the update complaint, but if they disable or change features in updates (like Sony does), I definitely understand why people would be upset. I'd assume you could just disable updates once you got it configured how you want although you should probably check the changelogs every so often to ensure there's no major security flaws being fixed since they're effectively an extension of your network. I will say that Sonos has really good sound quality, and the price while a bit high isn't crazy (by audio standards at least). At the very least they have some fairly innovative features like provding a secondary peer-to-peer network between devices to increase reliability.