Has anyone managed to connect a turntable so it can be played to a speaker group?

[Rdianco]

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Original Poster: Russell Kemp 

Hi everyone,

I've been puzzling over ways to get my turntable playing through the Google Nest range of speakers. From what I have found thus far, I think my only options are:

1)  Connect to the aux on my home max speaker to have audio out on that speaker only.
 - Not ideal for me, the whole point of going for this system is to have multi-room audio. This feels like a huge limitation. From what  I can gather this is a standard feature on the Sonos Five (not to mention their Port product).

2) Use Bluetooth.

 - Far from ideal, terrible sound quality in my experience (although that could have been in part due to the low quality BT turntable I have tested with). Not entirely sure this can be sent to a speaker group either, at least I couldn't get it to work 🙂

My last option is to build my own interface (I have researched and messed about with - but not completed yet). Using a Raspberry Pi, a DAC/pre-amp and some nifty Python code, I may be able to build a device that collects the audio and using Chromecast to send to a group. Should be viable, but feels like a messy solution for what should be a simple feature.

This issue, and the loss of the Chromecast audio (I loved those little guys, thankfully still have one that works) is really pushing me over to Sonos. I know Sonos doesn't solve the Chromecast audio issue directly, but they do have more options re connecting legacy hi-fi equipment to their system, which Next doesn't seem to.

Really hoping to find a viable solution to this, but may have to make the switch, as I really enjoy vinyl so this is a huge annoyance for me.

Any help you can offer would be greatly appreciated.

R

[Rdianco]

Hi,

Thanks for your reply.

When I referred to the max in the first option, I meant the older Google Home Max speaker, which does have a line-in port. But from what I can see this only works on the Home Max speaker itself, and can't be shared to a speaker group. Which is frustrating as the Sonos equivalent device (play:5 or newer five model) has a similar input, but theirs can be shared to a group. It would be great if this was a feature added for Google speakers.

Just an update. I have hacked together a solution of sorts. Using a raspberry pi with an additional pre-amp & ADC to take the input from the turntable. I then used software and some python scripts to collect this audio and send to either single speakers or speaker groups I have defined. It works, but it is a little clunky. This solution has also allowed me to create scripts to connect to a custom internet radio stream that requires authentication and broadcast to google speakers as I wish, which has resolved another problem I had.

It would be ideal to have these features added to Google suite of products:

1) ability to share line in audio with speaker groups. Although I have just seen the new speakers don't have line-in. So I'm assuming Google are removing the line-in feature from current and future products. Which is very disappointing if true.

2) a feature to add custom sources (in the case mentioned above, it is a URL to the stream with username:password auth request).

- From Russell Kemp (Original Poster)

[VulGerrity]

Do you have a git hub with your code/process?  I'd love to set something up like this.  I'm a fairly proficient hobbyist programmer, but I haven't worked with Raspberry Pi or Python yet.

If not, and if that's too much to ask, could you maybe point me in the right direction to start putting something like this together for myself?  Thanks!

[Agroves]

I actually want to build my own solution. Could you share more insight, I’d love to hear more. 

[Azarco]

Hey All,

Thanks for visiting the Community. 

Since this thread hasn't had activity in a while, we're going to close it to keep content fresh.

We hope you were able to get the help you need. If you still need assistance with your Google Nest devices, feel free to submit another post and provide as many details as possible so that others can lend a hand.

Thanks,
Alex