Article: Google Home Hub for HiFi?

[The Computer Audiophile]

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[wgscott]

I would settle for "Siri, run script #7" and program the rest, but as you point out, this isn't about the consumer.

[atmasphere]

My home hub arrives tomorrow and I am interested in a similar, but inverse solution ... using the new display / cast function of Roon I’m going to play music from Roon to a device and have the Home Hub serve as the display so for example when I’m playing music while cooking dinner or we are hanging in my kitchen / family room area, the Home Hub will be the what’s playing screen. 

 

You should be able to define a default output device for a Google Home and you can pick a Chromecast or group.  In my case my current Google Home defaults to Party which is both my kitchen home as well as a chromecast in the family room.  This works for news or music based on what you say. 

[The Computer Audiophile]

1 minute ago, atmasphere said:

My home hub arrives tomorrow and I am interested in a similar, but inverse solution ... using the new display / cast function of Roon I’m going to play music from Roon to a device and have the Home Hub serve as the display so for example when I’m playing music while cooking dinner or we are hanging in my kitchen / family room area, the Home Hub will be the what’s playing screen. 

 

You should be able to define a default output device for a Google Home and you can pick a Chromecast or group.  In my case my current Google Home defaults to Party which is both my kitchen home as well as a chromecast in the family room.  This works for news or music based on what you say. 

Cool. Let us know how it turns out. 

[Ralf11]

how hackable are these things??

[The Computer Audiophile]

23 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

how hackable are these things??

Not sure yet. 

[loop7]

Tangent, has anyone on CA tried a Chromecast Audio with a re-clocker between it and the DAC? For example, the iFi purifier? I thought the Chromecast Audio toslink to my DAC still sounded dreadful but I think Chris or maybe Darko wrote about it?

 

iFi SPDIF iPurifier

[umiami91]

The trouble always comes via voice when there are multiple versions of the same song; probability it will pick the one you don't want to hear (live version, demo, etc) ~100%.  Or if the band or album has a clever name like REM.  Or how about when you have multiple services?  

 

It's just such a pain that voice control for anything but the most basic musical requests for me has been a complete bust.  I don't even try anymore.  The HomePod has been relegated to something my kids fuss with.  

[ednaz]

22 hours ago, umiami91 said:

The trouble always comes via voice when there are multiple versions of the same song; probability it will pick the one you don't want to hear (live version, demo, etc) ~100%.  Or if the band or album has a clever name like REM.  Or how about when you have multiple services?  

 

It's just such a pain that voice control for anything but the most basic musical requests for me has been a complete bust.  I don't even try anymore.  The HomePod has been relegated to something my kids fuss with.  

 

I've found voice control to be more pain than gain. Way back in the 90s I used to use voice control for my presentations at conferences (my employer had some experimental capabilities loaded on my laptop) and I was fortunate to not have horrible things happen when I was on stage. Then again, I was VERY CAREFUL in what I asked it to do, and stuck with a vocabulary that I knew was reliable. 

 

We have Alexa in our kitchen and guest rooms, and after trying a lot of different things, we use the voice stuff very, very little. Radio and shopping lists. For the longest time, if I asked Alexa to play the radio station WETA, she'd try to connect me to WetRadio (whatever that is). There was no way around it. I sent the data to Amazon, showing every way I tried to make it work... and that it worked fine with any other radio station. I worked with natural language tools, and really, that was some slick trick turning W - E - T- A into WetRadio. We use it for shopping lists, but it does weird things from time to time. Like when we were at the grocery, opened the shopping list, and found soccer testicles on the list. Whatever that is. Painful no doubt. To this day we can't reconstruct what we said that produced that.

 

I can't begin to imagine the horrors I'd experience if I tried to use Alexa or Siri or Google voice for controlling my music library. I'd get the Monkees every time I asked for Monk.

[Ralf11]

I need to develop a song that will use voice control to call itself up - an endless recursive money machine...

[mwhitak]

Google can stick their Home Hub where the sun don't shine

[miguelito]

Doesn't the TIDAL app on iOS support Chromecast? Would that not add TIDAL to the list?

 

[The Computer Audiophile]

23 minutes ago, miguelito said:

Doesn't the TIDAL app on iOS support Chromecast? Would that not add TIDAL to the list?

 

Yes and no. Tidal app supports Chromecast but the Google Home devices must support the app for voice control to work with the service.

[esmit]

On 10/24/2018 at 7:13 AM, loop7 said:

Tangent, has anyone on CA tried a Chromecast Audio with a re-clocker between it and the DAC? For example, the iFi purifier? I thought the Chromecast Audio toslink to my DAC still sounded dreadful but I think Chris or maybe Darko wrote about it?

 

iFi SPDIF iPurifier

I do, it is a very convenient and good sounding solution, especially if you feed the ifi with an Sbooster. Not as good as an ultraRendu to usb in but I am much happier when my wife uses this instead of the audio out. Darko talked about this. Still have to try the usb-power-and-network adapter he suggested.

[LowMidHigh]

On 10/24/2018 at 12:13 PM, loop7 said:

Tangent, has anyone on CA tried a Chromecast Audio with a re-clocker between it and the DAC? For example, the iFi purifier? I thought the Chromecast Audio toslink to my DAC still sounded dreadful but I think Chris or maybe Darko wrote about it?

 

iFi SPDIF iPurifier

CC => mutec mc3+usb => active monitors. 

 

Sounds OK, but toslink is the at bottom of the digital perch. AES> coax> USB >optical, (generally speaking; the implementation makes a difference). 

[Melvin]

Quote

As of right now, I'd say lossless streaming via the new Google Home Hub output to a Chromecast Audio device is a no-go. I hope to hear back from Deezer about the issue, but I don't have high hopes. I'll update this article if I have any news or breakthroughs.

 

 

This is unfortunate. I have one coming soon and was hoping for a nice Deezer HiFi implementation. Hopefully it's addressed quickly. (Neither Google nor Deezer seem to do anything quickly.)