Beep: Bringing music to every room of your home

thisisbeep.com

25 points·jamesjyu··6 comments

Are interference effects between speakers that are in separate rooms a problem for sound quality? Does beep try to add delays to signals to compensate for this? I imagine it is a pretty hard problem for N > 2 assuming. I'd love a technical blog post about that.

Good question. We don't delay signals since the user may walk between rooms.

Syncing is an interesting problem for sure. It's really a question of how precisely you can sync the clocks between devices. Our current method is fairly naive, we let ntp sync clocks for us, count the number of samples played, and drop samples every now and then on devices that are behind. This gets us to 2ms accuracy between devices. We could get much lower with a better algorithm. But 2ms is very difficult to notice in a home listening situation between rooms.

Interesting. I probably wouldn't drop my Squeezebox setup for it since it seems to require iOS (7 only??)/Andriod devices to control what's playing and doesn't yet support playing audio from a computer.

Hey there! Shawn from Beep. We listed iOS7 since we're shipping in fall, it's market share is already pretty high. But if it's not high enough then we'll support iOS6.

We are also looking at supporting DLNA or some other local music protocol due to interest we're seeing.

Btw, love Squeezebox, Dean Blacketter, one of the founders and CTO is a friend and advisor to us.

Sonos for every/all speakers. Really impressive. Does it keep playing after I leave the house and independent of phone streaming?

It's independent of the phone. So the phone just acts like a remote control

Reply on news.ycombinator.com