No idea what I'm doing - livingroom speaker

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Joined
31 Oct 2012
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2,240
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Edinburgh
Apologies for the vague post, but I'm not really sure what I need.

As a rough idea, I'm looking for some speaker / sound system that will allow me to play music in one room from a variety of sources. These sources include some mobile phones (android) and laptops, possibly my desktop too. The music will sometimes be from things like spotify but may also be from youtube or other sources.

What I'd like is a system that is fairly idiot-proof that lets my wife & I play music easily from any given device. What I currently have is a bluetooth receiver into a cheap speaker via 3.5mm jack, which is paired with my wife's laptop. This works, but only for that one laptop unless we want to re-pair it etc.

After some fairly undirected googling I see things like the Sonos Play:1 which would let me play from the phones using spotify and things like this, but may be less good for e.g. youtube from a laptop, as it seems to all be done via app rather than just a sound output device. Edit: A Sonos Play:5 looks like it may do slightly better than the play:1 in a hacky way if I used the existing bluetooth setup to link the laptop to the 3.5mm in and then phones could use the app? Limits it to one laptop but meh.

To complicate things a bit I imagine it's likely that at some point I'd like to extend to other rooms too, for either all rooms playing the same music or single rooms playing something (e.g. I've got a projector set up - it might be nice to have decent sound in that room, while someone listens to music elsewhere or at least not all rooms have to listen to the movie!)


My question: Is there a good option to do what I want? Simplicity in playback is the primary goal though of course sound quality would be nice too. If the multi-room stuff complicates it too much then no worries. Any input is welcome! As for budget - there isn't a hard limit, I can afford a fair chunk if I can justify the cost to myself, though I'd rather stay south of £1k unless there is a really good reason otherwise.
 
Last edited:
Soldato
Joined
6 Sep 2016
Posts
9,441
A AV amplifier will so what you ask, and/or you may want to use dedicated amps per room, ie a small t-amp in secondary rooms with a av amplifier in the main room, sending optical to each room. Or if you have Cat5e cable to each room then get a media player(s) in each room,.or use wi-fi instead..with t-amp
 
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