The AudioCast is a low cost dongle that adds streaming services to your existing speaker setup.
For a long time the only option for a multi room sound system was the invest in Sonos speakers, these days you can buy low cost multi speaker systems such as the August WiFi speaker system, but what if you’ve an existing system you don’t want to replace?
While modern amps and speakers often have services such as Spoity Connect included many older systems, which are still brilliant sounding systems, don’t and that’s where the AudioCast can help.
It’s a small, circular, dongle that comes with an aux cable and USB power cable/plug. Aside from a set of instructions there isn’t anything else in the box, yet despite the minimal design this little gadget can add a lot of cool features to your music system.
Setup didn’t take too long, you plug the aux cable into your amp/speakers, power on the dongle and run the free app which will get the AudioCast connected to your network.
If you have problems with this method the manual explains how to connect directly to the AudioCast to allow you to set the network connection via a web portal.
Once connected to WiFi the AudioCast appears in the app and is ready to use.
The app lists a wide range of streaming sources that can be used including the big players of Spotify, Pandora, Tidal and TuneIn radio. You can also stream to it via Bluetooth, handy if you have friends over who want to share music but don’t want to go to the trouble of setting up the app.
To start with the app list can be a bit of an overwhelming list with there being so many options so it’s great to see the option to deactivate the options you don’t use to give you a cleaner interface.
If you’re a Spotify user you’ll be pleased to know the AudioCast is Spotify Connect compatible, allowing you to send music to your speakers via the Spotify app.
While one AudioCast is great, multiple units open up the world of multi room sound systems. Buy a second dongle for a second system and they’ll both appear in the app. They can play music independently of each other, or play the same track at the same time.
If you have two mono speakers you can set one to left and one to right giving you a stereo sound system.
If this sounds familiar it’s because the underlying system has been used in the aforementioned August WiFi speaker system and brilliantly these can be used together, a real advantage of other multiroom systems as it means you can use a range of products rather than be locked to a specific manufacturer.
As you’ll see in the review video below the system works really well, playing the same track across 3 devices. The track used was actually streamed via Bluetooth to all 3. In this configuration one device acts as the master so you only need a single Spotify connect premium account, but if you want to stream different songs to different devices you’d need multiple Spotify accounts (or use different streaming services).
The AudioCast is a low cost way to add a fantastic range of features to existing audio equipment and can be picked up from:
- Amazon UK: http://amzn.to/2wwiuwN
- Amazon USA: http://amzn.to/2vtLR65
- Amazon.ca: http://amzn.to/2vtvINZ
