Pine64 launch $50 smart speaker for Home Assistant tinkerers
omgubuntu.co.uk
omgubuntu.co.uk
https://www.thirdreality.com/products/voice-music-assistant-...
EDIT: but unlike Pine, ThirdReality one comes with quad-core ARM A53 CPU; 256MB RAM; 512MB flash; and can actually do audio processing. The price is about 1.5 times higher though
There is a product development strategy (I'm not sure if there's a formal name for it) where you're given a lead on a finite-but-large supply of parts you can acquire for absurdly cheap; so you buy the batch; develop and price a product around the part; market your product until you run out of the part; and then, rather than switching over to paying retail for the parts and pricing up your product, you just put your product on indefinite restock hiatus (only ever to be fulfilled if you happen to get another lead on a cheap supply of that same part.)
Usually, though, you get a lead on a cheap supply of a different part; and so the cycle begins again.
This is how Aldi and Lidl fueled their growth. Instead of focusing on thousands of different product offerings, they looked at a narrower selection of products (~20 times smaller than their higher end competition) they can buy in very high volumes at substantial discounts. Their offering is defined by what is available for them at the time to buy under those conditions. Instead of ensuring a specific product is always available on the shelves, they might just stock a different product at specific times.
This is less obvious when 90% of their sales are under their private label but the supply behind it is whatever they can negotiate for a better deal.
Their "middle aisle" is the perfect example of this, it really just stocks a mix of whatever is the cheap product of the week and may no longer be available next week at the same price so they stock something else.
I've also heard that's how McDonalds does McRib sandwiches—they only offer it when pork futures are cheap enough.
We've got hard physical constraints with loudspeaker systems, and they show up as tradeoffs.
Very broadly speaking, in practical terms, this takes the form of a tradeoff betwixt enclosure volume, efficiency, and low-end frequency extension. It's impossible to improve all three of these at once. This was formalized with Thiele and Small's work ~60 years ago.
We get by with amazingly good small, self-amplified, active speakers these days because -- as a system -- they don't have the same constraints.
At their root, they're still just passive speakers... but whole of an active system comprises more than that. We can use EQ to improve low-end extension. We can use bigger amplifiers to make up for lack of efficiency.
We can use combinations of dynamic EQ and bigger amps to make small systems sound pretty darned good even at low volume and hold together nicely at higher volumes, thanks in part of some of the work of Fletcher and Munson nearly a century ago and also to modern measurement systems and the inexpensiveness of implementing functions (with DSP in 2026) that would have been unthinkably complex in the consumer analog space at any point on the timeline.
But while active speakers can be pretty neat, small passive speakers suck. They have always sucked in some way. They must always suck in some way compared to their larger peers, and a cube shape always makes some aspects of the suck even worse. Them's the breaks.
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Anyway, the market wants small, active speakers these days...so we get small, active speakers. Reviewers are people too, and they review what people want to buy.
If I may ask: What's driving your desire for a small speaker that is also passive?
Clearly it can be done, its just noone seem to be investing in RnD enough.
A Macbook comprises an entire audio system, with amplification and DSP and everything else that a passive speaker -- by its very nature -- can never provide.
I explained this once. If you read through it, and take the time to understand it, and then think that you can explain it with superior brevity, then by all means: Feel free. :)
If you have questions, then: Please ask them.
If you think you can also defy what are commonly accepted to be real physical constraints and produce a tiny passive practical speaker that sounds great, then: By all means, do that as well! The proceeds of this kind of success can make you very wealthy -- maybe not Mars-mission wealthy, but probably at least beach house, private flights, and built-to-spec Porsche 911 GT3-level wealthy. You'll then be able to take time to decide what your next venture is, or perhaps decide to just live with that level of lavishness doing whatever makes you happy until your days run out.
People with fresh ears are born every day.
I’m deep into the HA system so I cannot wait for Echo-quality that I can attach to my HA.
Anything involving Sonos with wires increases support cost. Simply involving wires produces new ways for people to screw things up (as if supporting their wireless-only customers wasn't expensive enough).
And those who are using wires but not screwing things up gain the ability to expand and improve their audio systems in their own ways, without paying the Sonos tax to do so. They can buy/upgrade whatever speakers they want from any manufacturer in the world, while keeping the same Sonos Amp. That represents lost opportunity, so the amp gets taxed harder.
(The tech inside the Sonos Amp isn't particularly novel. It's just a small Linux box with a trick proprietary software stack and some audio hardware.)
[0] - https://audiocast.io/
Airplay 2. I have it hooked via optical to a soundbar.
I don't own any of their products, but I am glad they exist.
Everyone I know who is vaguely-serious about soldering has their own favorite brand/method/voodoo, so they're not interested in the soldering irons even if we do a direct comparison and the Pinecil performs better. (There's no accounting for taste, I guess.)
But the PinePower box is different. I've helped them sell a few of those to various geeky friends. They do what they're supposed to do, handle all of the various fast-charging standards that small portable widgets tend to use, and they do it in a usefully-informative way.
So it's wonderful for charging stuff and can easily earn a permanent place in a household, and a person can very clearly see if a given charging cable is being difficult for whatever reason that it is without goofing around with extra parts like USB power analyzers.
I hope they stick around. They seem to be one of the good ones.
What I like about Pine64 is that they go for low price points. Most of their products seems to be priced in line with low- or mid-end proprietary alternatives. Yes you can still complain about the hardware you get for what you pay but IMO for this kind of stuff, it's better to have an accessible price point and limited hardware than to charge a premium price for mid-range hardware that is still limited by experimental software support.
Sometimes I wish they would charge a little more and use that extra $$$ to pay someone to make the things work. there are too many rough edges that a full time developer would just fix, but nobody in the community gets "a round touit". These are things I could fix, but after my day job and getting my kids to everything I don't have energy left to focus.
Huh, maybe I should contact them, since I am freelancing now….
It somewhat reminds me of the PineCube, which had 128MB DDR3. Once the Linux tax was paid it was basically unusable.
> Factory shipped firmware is open-source and provides Wyoming Satellite, compatible with assistence platforms such as Home Assistant.
They are at least supposed to be able to show it working with some factory software [1]. I would have just liked to have seen some edge compute capability.
Like the Penny Arcade comic about a director who’s making a movie that’s not meant for the critics. “Wait, you can do that?”
Audiophiles are safe from this device.
Analog doesn't allow all the tricks the loudness wars required to win, so often analog really was better than digital. That is garbage in garbage out, and analog got less garbage on the input side. When someone who cares about good music in a perfect listening environment mixes and masters everything to the best of the technology, then digital is better. (but note that perfect listening environment is rare in the real world so good experts are compromising anyway to try to correct for the bad environment people listen in, this can be done well or bad)
CDs improved over LPs in dynamic range, frequency response, error correction, replayability, stereo separation, and noise floor. They also, at scale, became much cheaper to manufacture and distribute.
But if the engineers, producers and marketers insist on not using the technical capabilities, or deliberately degrading them to chase perceived loudness, there's nothing the purchaser can do except complain.
Audiophiles are the easiest marks on earth, man.
https://en.bouffalolab.com/product/?type=detail&id=16
voice processing is in hardware unfortunately, but it exposes some things like DOA
I love that this is out and one day hope to replace my alexas and whatnot so I can turn on my lights without hearing an ad for amazon prime.