Have you tried casting directly from your phone to the new speakers, or
the speaker group? Once I did that the problem went away even for
initiating music from the speakers themselves.
The problem stopped for me long ago, once I did the workaround of
casting to those speakers directly from my phone, just once, before
resuming the "Hey Google, play song-name" approach. Somehow that fixed
it.
I thought it was just me. The new sound is terrible! I rely on white
noise to get some good sleep, and now it doesn't work for me.Why does
Google always want to take something that's good and break it? "If it
ain't broke, don't fix it!"