Chromecast Audios are still easy to pick up on eBay (or if you're in the UK, CeX, that's where I got one).
Any old cheap plug tied to Home Assistant (or plain old Google Home in my case) for auto powering on my Cambridge Audio amp. (I'm not fancy enough to care about automated input switching between TV and music, I just get up and turn the knob, but turning off the hifi remotely I like)
Music Assistant supports streaming to Chromecast from TIDAL at the native (24 bit, 96khz, flac/m4a?) format. And TIDAL mobile app itself supports casting to Chromecast devices as you'd expect.
Those 3 things combined got me an old school hifi set up which I can include in my Chromecast groups of shitty sounding second-hand nest minis, so I get multi room audio where one room has the most audio :-) but I could swap out the shitty pucks for some more CC audios if I wanted to fork out for more amps and bookshelf speakers.
I trust Google to at least not intentionally brick their old devices and chromecast is built on mDNS and documented http endpoints enough that you can automate your own stuff in your LAN that you should be able to keep that stuff working in home assistant + music assistant should Google ever decide randomly they wanna sunset Google home (so, 50% chance of them announcing that in 2025).
Homebrew you can roll your own DIY multi room hifi audio using stuff like Hifiberry, too. Pipewire/PulseAudio/JACK on raspberry pi / NUCs should be able to get you surround sound over the network with minimal latency (although you probably want decent ethernet), since you can make a virtual sink that bridges the audio servers together.
You have one of those fancy hifis that has hdmi inputs and digital input selection and whatnot? Okay yeah you'd have to roll your own HDMI CEC automation again with a raspberry pi or whatever. Eminently doable.
There's definitely ways to get multi room audio of equivalent or better quality and at-least-equal user experience as long as you're willing to invest the time in doing loads of DIY shenanigans, but honestly it's pretty easy these days. For me, I think the "this is too complicated for me to implement" bar is not high enough to warrant buying Sonos
Any old cheap plug tied to Home Assistant (or plain old Google Home in my case) for auto powering on my Cambridge Audio amp. (I'm not fancy enough to care about automated input switching between TV and music, I just get up and turn the knob, but turning off the hifi remotely I like)
Music Assistant supports streaming to Chromecast from TIDAL at the native (24 bit, 96khz, flac/m4a?) format. And TIDAL mobile app itself supports casting to Chromecast devices as you'd expect.
Those 3 things combined got me an old school hifi set up which I can include in my Chromecast groups of shitty sounding second-hand nest minis, so I get multi room audio where one room has the most audio :-) but I could swap out the shitty pucks for some more CC audios if I wanted to fork out for more amps and bookshelf speakers.
I trust Google to at least not intentionally brick their old devices and chromecast is built on mDNS and documented http endpoints enough that you can automate your own stuff in your LAN that you should be able to keep that stuff working in home assistant + music assistant should Google ever decide randomly they wanna sunset Google home (so, 50% chance of them announcing that in 2025).
Homebrew you can roll your own DIY multi room hifi audio using stuff like Hifiberry, too. Pipewire/PulseAudio/JACK on raspberry pi / NUCs should be able to get you surround sound over the network with minimal latency (although you probably want decent ethernet), since you can make a virtual sink that bridges the audio servers together.
You have one of those fancy hifis that has hdmi inputs and digital input selection and whatnot? Okay yeah you'd have to roll your own HDMI CEC automation again with a raspberry pi or whatever. Eminently doable.
There's definitely ways to get multi room audio of equivalent or better quality and at-least-equal user experience as long as you're willing to invest the time in doing loads of DIY shenanigans, but honestly it's pretty easy these days. For me, I think the "this is too complicated for me to implement" bar is not high enough to warrant buying Sonos