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Comment by noodlesUK | Hacker News Reader

One feature I wish Apple would build into this would be a 3.5mm jack or optical audio out. I have a lot of very nice speakers already in my house, but no multi-room audio, or voice assistant. I know the echos can do this, but I don’t want them spying on me.

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Every single amazon echo device has a 3.5mm jack. And chromecast audios are going for $90 on eBay. I just want a simple solution to stream to my old speakers that isn't bluetooth or Amazon. I would've 100% bought a homepod mini if it had an audio out.

AppleTV does this. I believe you can use it as a headless sound machine. Mine has optical out.

That's how I can use my sub-woofer and anything else plugged into the receiver.

Unfortunately, the newest models do not have optical audio out, only HDMI.

This is disappointing

They dropped it in 2015. The old airport express has audio out as well.

My dad watches Craigslist for old Airport Expresses because he wants to replace their Chromecast Audio with something that can talk to Apple Music, but Apple bafflingly doesn't have any current AirPlay offerings to connect external speakers.

I have an AirPort Extreme he can have? It’s just in a box in the garage, I’ll ship it to you for nothing.

Bit bigger than the Express obviously. Hmm I may even have a really old one of those, too.

Thanks - that's really kind!

He's interested in it to connect his speakers to AirPlay. Does your model do that?

Hey, I have a fairly old Airport Express; the box says 2004. The physical "factory reset" button doesn't seem to work anymore, but it's in a ready-to-be-configured default state (I got it there by connecting it to a network via Ethernet). It would need the old version of Airport Utility, but I'm assuming your dad knows that already, if he's looking for the old ones.

If he's interested, please let me know.

Once upon a time, Apple shipped with all Macbook with 3.5mm jacks that doubled up as optical audio out. Ah, the good old days

My understanding is that the HomePods cannot play audio in real-time, due to the processing involved.

There's Sonos also

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