Google Home Mini + separates setup

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Hi all,

I’m looking at getting at a Google Home Mini but would like to connect to separates system for music.

Ideally it would be via optical so I can use the DAC (Cyrus 8 DAC). I see there are various Bluetooth to aux or Bluetooth to optical devices.

Does anyone have any experience with these or is there a better way of doing this? e.g. via WiFi with airplay or something else.

Thanks very much.
 
It doesn’t. That’s why I’m looking for some device to bridge between them. Perhaps not clear from my original description.

Question is: is there a device to link google home mini to hifi separates wirelessly. It looks like people used to do this with a Chromecast audio but i understand they aren’t made anymore and there might be something newer that might work better and/or also have an optical out as well as aux.
 
If you can pair a Google Home Mini to a BT speaker or maybe BT headphones, then I don't see why you can't pair it to a BT receiver with a line out and connect that to your Hi-fi system.

This YT video seems to show how to pair the mini to a speaker. Follow the same method for your chosen BT receiver.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0Mls_BDLzGQ&feature=youtu.be

Do a Google search for BT receivers.

I don't know if I'd bother with the fancy DAC though given what BT can do in compressing the audio stream.
 
Is there a WiFi alternative that anyone have used with optical out? Agree that compression will be a problem over bluetooth which is why people have used the chromecast audio previously that was WiFi.
 
You seem to be trying awfully hard to make a square peg fit in a round hole. I'm not sure quite what you've seen regarding using a Wi-Fi link from a Google Chromecast Audio in to a Hi-Fi, so perhaps some links from you would be useful.

In the meantime, my experience with the Chromecast was that Wi-Fi was the way to get an audio stream in to the device. Audio out was via the 3.5mm dual function socket. It was both an analogue out and an Optical out.I haven't come across anyone so far using Wi-Fi as a way to then get audio out of a Chromecast. What would be the point?

Chromecast had no control interface of its own. It relied on control from a 3rd party device to point the Chromecast at a suitable audio stream. The connection from that 3rd party device to the Chromecast was via the house Wi-Fi, and typically the controller was a smartphone or tablet or PC using Google's Chrome browser.

The Achilles heel for audiophiles wanting to use the Chromecast as a cheap streamer was the audio out. The analogue audio out wasn't good, and the Optical out had a tonne of jitter.

The analogue output quality is no real surprise. It was a £40 bit of hardware doing quite a lot, so there wasn't a lot of money left in the budget to build in a decent DAC. Besides that, who would notice if they did aside from a few mad audiophiles? I'm guessing most Chromecast Audios were plugged in to audio systems that couldn't show up the quality, so it was good enough.

The Optical out was - for the mass market, at least - the same story; as long as its good enough for most people then that's fine. However, the jitter was partly to do with how it was driven and then partly about the quality of the noise filtering in the DAC it was connected to. Driving it from Roon was the key to cutting the source jitter. You can read more about this here: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...ents-of-chromecast-audio-digital-output.4544/
The main point here is that to extract any kind of serious Hi-Fi performance from the CCA required a £120 per year subscription to a driver service plus a £200+ DAC. Suddenly this £40 CCA is starting to look a lot more expensive.

The question from all of this then is whether you want a high quality audio streamer, or whether you want a smart assistant that does a bit of audio? My view is that the two things are not the same.
 
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the home / nest mini can be modified to add an analogue output, but it's a hack and the SQ is questionable at best (and mono!)

The answer really depends on what you want to do. If you just want to stream audio from a device then you dont need the home to do it. If you want the home also for it's google assistant functionality then you could get a bluetooth receiver - you can pair homes to bluetooth devices. Audio quality would be dependant on the reciever and will be a waste of time if you want something to feed a DAC.

The other possibility, if you want a solution that's tightly integrated with google services, is to use a regular chromecast and a hdmi audio extractor. regular chromecasts can be used as the default 'speaker' for a home/nest mini. So, anything you do with the mini would output audio to the chromecast and you could cast audio only directly to the chromecast. With a HDMI audio extractor, both will give you an spdif output to drive a DAC. Audio quality would still be a bit of an unknown, but it's most probably better than any bluetooth solution and you'll still have everything else the mini offers.
 
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What about going to the Amazon Alexa range instead? Same functionality but their old Dots used to have an optical out.
 
This would have been very straightforward by using a Chromecast Audio but as you mentioned Google have discontinued them. I have multiple Google Homes and a CCA plugged into my amplifier (via optical) and it works beautifully. I can't believe Google have taken that away. If my CCA dies I'm not sure what I can do to replicate my current setup :confused:

lucid said:
The Optical out was - for the mass market, at least - the same story; as long as its good enough for most people then that's fine. However, the jitter was partly to do with how it was driven and then partly about the quality of the noise filtering in the DAC it was connected to.
Click to expand...
You seem to know a lot about the detail here, so I'm happy to be proven wrong but surely if you're using the optical-out of the CCA it's down to your amplifier's DAC to convert the stream. So the CCA is not really touching the stream, and you get decent quality. (Warning; slight layman's terms there).

Anyway, I wouldn't touch anything bluetooth with a bargepole :o
 
lucid said:
The Optical out was - for the mass market, at least - the same story; as long as its good enough for most people then that's fine. However, the jitter was partly to do with how it was driven and then partly about the quality of the noise filtering in the DAC it was connected to. Driving it from Roon was the key to cutting the source jitter. You can read more about this here: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...ents-of-chromecast-audio-digital-output.4544/
The main point here is that to extract any kind of serious Hi-Fi performance from the CCA required a £120 per year subscription to a driver service plus a £200+ DAC. Suddenly this £40 CCA is starting to look a lot more expensive.
Click to expand...


I'd read the thread before ... but he doesn't seem to sufficiently acknowledge, yes, you have to make sure you're getting bitstreamed music to the cca, for good results.
if you are casting to the cca from chrome browser, as opposed to plex or tidal apps,
you would be subjected to the (android/windows) desktop mixer, so, not exclusive, and maybe re-sampling (44.1->48), plus, potentially, some lossy encoding, that might be chewing up your cpu, versus the cca taking the stream from the server directly.
Tidal exclusive mode (ie. no desktop mixer) availaible in their app gives night and day results, for a wired dac (mines, pci express) from a windows devices.
the same issue applies on airplay, apple ecosystem, if you have an apple lossless encode that should be bitstreamed to the airplay receiver


You can still get refurbed cca's.

Rarely use cca now, but if i used the optical out, i'd probably get a more stable voltage supply, or a power-pack - the 'reviewer' does not seem to discuss that, a re-clocker is another suggestion i've seen, but thats £50+
 
Scam said:
Anyway, I wouldn't touch anything bluetooth with a bargepole
Click to expand...
apart from connection issues, if you are able to use a BT profile, where the original source is bitstreamed eg AAC/ALC ... then BT could be good.
but, with, interference from dect phones, kitchen microwaves, ..... ymmv
 
Scam said:
This would have been very straightforward by using a Chromecast Audio but as you mentioned Google have discontinued them. I have multiple Google Homes and a CCA plugged into my amplifier (via optical) and it works beautifully. I can't believe Google have taken that away. If my CCA dies I'm not sure what I can do to replicate my current setup :confused:

You seem to know a lot about the detail here, so I'm happy to be proven wrong but surely if you're using the optical-out of the CCA it's down to your amplifier's DAC to convert the stream. So the CCA is not really touching the stream, and you get decent quality. (Warning; slight layman's terms there).

Anyway, I wouldn't touch anything bluetooth with a bargepole :o
Click to expand...

Jitter can manifest itself as noise if it's bad enough. But its overplayed, especially where the CCA was concerned. Yes it suffered with casting but that was because of the lack of bit perfect playback at the time. Now Bit perfect playback isn't only available through roon, JRiver and dbpoweramp (and others now, probably) will cast bit perfect 24/96 to a CCA.

http://archimago.blogspot.com/2016/02/measurements-google-chromecast-audio.html

As you can see, jitter is a non-issue even with a <$50 streaming device receiving the audio data off a WiFi network. For the sake of completeness, there are a pair of obvious sidebands evident in the 24-bit J-Test of very low level corresponding to +/-250Hz. In terms of amplitude, these are 115dB below the primary 12kHz signal! Absolutely irrelevant in ability to impact sound quality.
Click to expand...
 
Scam said:
You seem to know a lot about the detail here, so I'm happy to be proven wrong but surely if you're using the optical-out of the CCA it's down to your amplifier's DAC to convert the stream. So the CCA is not really touching the stream, and you get decent quality. (Warning; slight layman's terms there).
Click to expand...

In terms of the mechanics i.e which bit of hardware does what job - then sure, the DAC in your audio chain does the DAC'ing - :D However, as others have said, there are ways to get it right and ways to get it wrong; not just DAC'ing but the quality of the source stream too.

Have you tried any of the things the other posters have suggested and had a listen for yourself?
 
I bought some old stock google chromecast audio to fit that exact role

expensive fir what they are but work a charm with promised ongoing support from google (so I read)
 
Chromecast audio or Alexa dot are easily the cheapest way to do this.

However there are streamers like the bluesound node 2i that work with Google Voice on a basic level and can stream directly from online.

Cambridge audios's streamer also supports Chromecast but unsure about the voice, but maybe you could cobble together an IFTT for it.
 
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