Hey guys, I think perhaps I misunderstood but wanted to clarify here. Does adding the Zone Extender add four more “sources” ontop of the AmpliPi?
Basically giving you 8 sources and 12 zones? Or does the Zone Extender “only” add 6 more zones? Thus giving you 4 sources and 12 zones?
Wanted to ask about this, getting more than 4 sources in some way would be great once expanding beyond 6 zones.
Hi Ryan,
Yup, zone expanders increase the number of zones in your system, not sources. To be honest we have yet to really find a good use case that requires more than 4 different audio streams playing at one time in a house. Each zone expander adds 12 speakers or 6 zones. I currently have 3 zone expanders in my house. You can add up to 5 zone expanders to create a system of 36 zones. The 4 sources are global in that you can play them to any of the 36 zones.
Thanks Jason, appreciate the elaboration here.
My main usecase is combined with Alexa’s at my house. Currently I have bluetooth adapters connected to each source on the AmpliPi. E.g.:
Source 1: Kitchen
Source 2: Family Room
Source 3: Living Room
Source 4: Master Bedroom
Each bluetooth adapter is connected wirelessly to an Amazon Echo. So each room get’s their own Alexa and “Source” for example. In this way, I can utilize the speakers more improptu-like and with Alexa. Especially since most of them don’t utilize Aux out.
Hi Ryan,
Interesting. I get what your trying to go for. The idea of having impromptu-like connections is something we have on our software road-map. The nice thing is what you are describing is not really limited by the 4 simultaneously playing sources hardware limit. The idea is to have something like inactive or parked sources that activate when you start playing audio to them. This is technically possible. Now if 5 people walked into 5 different rooms in your house and each wanted to play a different song in each room, you’ll hit the hardware source limit.
The only downside with your approach is grouping is a bit of a pain. What I ended up going for in my house was the Echo Link. I have two plugged into two of the inputs on the back of my AmpliPro. You can tell any Alexa to start playing audio on one or more Alexas. I named my two echo links upstairs and downstairs. I typically keep my upstairs on one group in my house and my downstairs in another group. When I walk into any room that has an Alexa, I tell it to play whatever on the Upstairs, and it starts playing that stream to all the zones upstairs.Or I can tell it to play to the Upstairs and Downstairs and I get it on the entire house. I’ve been thinking about adding a third for the outside zones.
Hey Jason thanks for the insight. Good to know about your Echo Links use case.
Yeah in my instance, I more or less was able to group them by Alexa groups and use them in that way, but enjoy hearing her responses and feedback through the speakers as well. Feels more integrated. We often silo our music by room moreso than a whole floor (different music tastes!).
If you ever consider more sources or being able to link two AmpliPi’s together (instead of just the zone exapnder) as a zone + source “adder”, I’d be all for it!