Sonos Alternative

[George Hincapie]

I stumbled across this as the weekend: http://www.teufelaudio.co.uk/raumfeld-audio-streaming/raumfeld-connector-p9527.html

It looks fully featured and is keenly priced. I would have preferred SPDIF instead of TOSLink, but you can't have everything.

 

[George Hincapie]

Any advantage to using this over an airport express which is much cheaper?

Yes. AE doesn't stream Tidal/Spotify AFAIK. This has a control app like Sonos that will run from any Android or iOS device.

 

[George Hincapie]

Or the ridiculously cheap Chromecast Audio? £30 and does multi-room with analog/digital out and alledgedly supports lossless (FLAC, but not ALAC)

See above. I am all about streaming Tidal HIFI, not playing network stored CD rips. Besides, CA has a crap quality 3.5mm jack, the Connect has a much higher quality TOS Link to feed my DAC into the rest of my HIFI separates.

 

[George Hincapie]

*Grumpy Edit*

 

[George Hincapie]

The CA has optical.out and streams tidal hifi as well. Audio quality is reported to be good and it supports 24/96khz which I believe is better than sonos? Which was only CD 16/44.1 last time I looked.

When I looked at the CA site I saw nothing about Optical; I'll have another look. Doesn't CA require Bubble uPNP or something to stream?

You say we must be gypsies for moaning about the cost yet you created this thread based on a cost saving product. :facepalm

Bad day - forgive me.

 

[George Hincapie]

You can stream both with an airport express using airplay.

Are there any quality restrictions doing that? I have a Tidal HIFI account (CD Quality), will it play those files properly?

 

[George Hincapie]

Thanks DD.