My preliminary verdict: The Chromecast Audio is a wonderful piece of hardware. It could benefit from some better powersaving (power in idle is the same as when streaming...) but it's not much either way, so no big worries. Sound quality seems fine, but I haven't done any in-depth testing yet. It seems to have no trouble with 24/192 content from Qobuz (playing via Analogue Out, so using the built-in DAC). Connection seems stable, but I did not do any extensive testing yet. It's basically like a Raspberry Pi with HiFiBerry DAC and Digi, all in one with a neat little case (that thing is tiny!!!) and PSU for much less money than the Pi with accessories.
What really makes this less than optimal for me though, is the fact that it heavily relies on my Phone. I've currently got my LMS/Picoreplayer system set up to just start playing the last selected Playlist or Radio Station when I turn it on. So, basically I cut power, then it's off, I turn on the power, then it's on and continues where it left off. With the Chromecast, there is no button to press on the device to pause or stop, and there is no option to resume (at the moment). So, as soon as I turned off the music or left the WiFi, next time I have to take out my phone, navigate to the app, wait for the Chromecase Icon to show up, tap it, select my Chromecast, tapt Connect, wait for it to connect, then select what I want to play. That's a huge amount of stuff that I don't really want to handle every time I start or stop music. I hope Google implements some kind of "Pause and Resume" function so that the CC picks up the last station or PL it was Playing when it goes back online. However, for that to work it needs to store that info somewhere, so it would need a "Server" which is does not have, so no idea how that could work. Really, the LMS infrastructure is way superior to this, sadly support for Streaming Services isn't good, and likely won't get better. That's why it would be perfect, if we could use the CC in conjunction with LMS, but that is probably as unlikely to happen as official Play Music Support for LMS... :( ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CommanderROR's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=59408 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=104383 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
