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Comment by pharos92 | Hacker News Reader

I was recently in the market for a speaker. Had an odd set of requirements...

- Portable (i.e. bluetooth + battery)

- Loud (as it's predominantly used in my workshop and on the deck - hence portable)

- WiFi support because bluetooth is annoying for connection-sharing. Spotify Connect is predominantly how I like to connect & share.

I looked into Sonos long and hard, and it looked like a complete mess. For the price, it simply couldn't be justified.

Ultimately I couldn't find something that met all my requirements for the price. So I just bought a UE Hyperboom. 20 hours of battery life + USB Power + Optical & 3.5mm Audio in. I bought a M5 Audiocast from AliExpress that provides WiFi Spotify Connect capability.

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I went with a Ryobi bluetooth speaker. Has 3.5 audio in, usb charge and bluetooth for cheap.

https://www.ryobitools.com/products/details/33287187102

No wifi but your phone can do spotify over wifi->bluetooth->speaker.

How's the audio quality? I see plenty of the major tool vendors have bluetooth speakers.

I've got plenty of Ryobi Tools but always wrote off tool vendors when it came to audio.

Quality is meh, but loud enough to overvoice my power tools.

It's ghastly to me that Google seems to have just given up. There were a bunch of portable speakers coming out with Chromecast. JBL Link in 2017, for example. I have some Sony gear from around the same time (fine speaker, fine Chromecast, but some truly godawful bad wifi connectivity).

But now there's almost nothing coming out. Chromecast Audio feels like an ever shrinking ever less available technology. And there just aren't any alternatives in the running!

It seems like easy money to me to be honest but they seem to have given up like you say. Google assistant is declining at a terrific rate too - I asked it what the time was a few days ago and got a Wikipedia definition.

It's unfortunate that Google relentlessly axes great products.

Honestly whenever I am looking for speaker these days, I reuse some inexpensive HiFi speakers for the second hand market and plug an amp from aliexpress/amazon with bluetooth capabilities.

Only issue is they are usually advertising their bluetooth at all time so anyone in the street can connect to them by mistake. I just power them off when not in use anyway so no big deal.

I have some fine $300 bookshelf speakers and tpa3255 chipamps setup in the living room and office; it's great yeah. I tend to think most people will end up with sub-par gear if they try to go secondhand, won't fully appreciate what value you can just buy new just looking at online recommendations in your price range, but if you want to be persistent & picky & eventually eventually snap up a steal secondhand does come up with some buried treasure sometimes.

I do have to switch inputs between Chromecast Audio and the computer that's plugged in. That's annoying. And I'd rather have Chromecast alike built into the amp like Nexus Q showed. At the very least these chipamps could offer me a 5v1a for powering my Chromecast. There are a couple fancy semi-expensive amps that do have Google's audio casting, but they're big-ish fuller-sized receivers and honestly expensive.

This setup I have has been kind of portable, but mannnn I don't love it. I literally have a chipamps velcroed to the side of a speaker. There's a 6s lipo for the chipamps and a USB battery bank for the Chromecast, plus cables for both power supplies. Audio cables from Chromecast to chipamps to speakers. I've gone long on making this a portable useful anywhere system and it rocks.

The one simplification is using some powered speakers. Micca PB42 and Neumi BS5p both will self-power off the 6s lipo batteries, are ~$150.

But it's just absurd & wild that speakers with networked audio are so un-mainstream. That I had to velcro this package together myself is absurd. How has the ecosystem only narrowed and narrowed? (Meanwhile Sonos is busy committing deep-cut enshittification/de-networkization).

They were sued by Sonos for patent infringement.

yeah Sonos won for a bit there Google keep at it and overturn it. https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/10/23910694/sonos-google-pa...

but i think the damage has been done at Google the resource move to other projects while the legal cases got worked out.

one time Google was going to release Google surround sound that works with Google TV but this courtcase delay it all.

Tangent, but I'm honestly interested in understanding how you use Spotify Connect and why you prefer it over bog standard Bluetooth or even a wired connection.

I'm reading up on this M5 Audiocast product and I'm failing to see how it's anything other than allowing you to stream music to a device via WiFi in stead of Bluetooth. Extra dongle, cables, connections and yet another app for no benefit that I can see.

Maybe I'm out of touch, but when I'm with friends or family, there's usually a speaker somewhere connected to a phone, and that phone is playing tunes. Someone is in charge of the phone and what is playing. Rarely do we care what is playing though because that's not why we are together. If someone wants to share a specific song they like with the group, they can either play it from the "DJ" phone, or just connect their own device to the speaker and play.

Possibly I'm just a 34 year old boomer and I don't understand how the kids like to party these days.

No, honestly it's a great question. And I'm well past the age of big parties, I'm 18 months younger than you.

With Bluetooth, the relationship is Phone streaming directly to the speaker. This places a full dependency on the phone and results in some major issues (IMO).

- With bluetooth you're severely limited by range (between phone and speaker). If you wander off to the bathroom or other end of the house you'll most likely experience degradation, stuttering or disconnects. So your phone must be near the speaker at all times.

- Bluetooth is taxing on phones, sacrificing battery life.

- Bluetooth is painful to share with. Even on the Hyperboom Speaker that has 2x Bluetooth channels. You can't just hand over connectivity to someone else easily.

Spotify Connect changes the relationship drastically and therefore experience. Your phone instructs the Audio Player (M5) to connect to Spotify directly, removing the dependency from your phone. Since the Audio Player will connect directly, this reduces load on your phone and you're free to wander off. It also allows anyone else with a Spotify account to take control of the connection without messy bluetooth disconnect/connect events.

It's just better in all regards IMO.

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