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Comment by azinman2 | Hacker News Reader

AirPlay 1 doesn't have the nice multi-room audio support that AirPlay 2 does. It only has a much hackier version that works from iTunes, but not from your iPhone's media controller.

But if you only ever want to play to 1 device, then you're set.

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The 3rd generation AirPort Express (A1392; the flat/non-wall wart 2012 version) supports AirPlay 2. All generations of the AirPort Express also have a mini-TOSLINK output allowing for a pure digital audio stream from the source to the receiver/amplifier.

Not only would that require me to buy an AirPort Express per speaker, many Sonos speakers don’t have an audio in jack. Thus my desire to bridge this purely in software.

It’s a bit janky for what you want do to, but if you have any Sonos S1 device with an input, you should be able to group that device with whatever other speakers you want playing the audio input. (And if that input device is a speaker that you don’t want playing, you can turn the volume all the way down.)

While probably not an ideal solution for the parent poster, who understandably wants to make things work with their existing Sonos gear, the A1392 is an outstanding value at this point because there are absolute truckloads of them on eBay for ~$20.

Assuming you're okay with AirPlay (which, admittedly, rules a lot of HN folks out) this is a $20-per-room device that gives you full lossless multiroom streaming including your choice of analog or optical out. Really great.

I have two Chromecast Audio devices which similarly provide both analogue and optical digital outputs, but they seem to be much more expensive second hand than the Airplay alternative.

I'm not sure if Chromecast Audios support lossless, if that matters.

Shame there’s nothing similar for video airplay. I needed to add airplay to an old/cheap dumb tv just for apple fitness in my partner’s workout room, and the only cost-sensible thing was an ad-infested roku device.

    Shame there’s nothing similar for video airplay.

Isn't there? You can pick up 3rd/4th gen AppleTVs on eBay for $20 all day long.

I had a 3rd gen Apple TV, but it had grown nearly unusably buggy. Still-supported apps would randomly crash or fail to stream, AirPlay would randomly fail entirely or fail to play video, streams/AirPlay would randomly stop, various operations would randomly take minutes to complete or time out.

Basically the issues as detailed here, though I had it more recently than the 7.6 software update: https://tidbits.com/2020/09/28/third-generation-apple-tvs-su...

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