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Creating a group of Echo devices to play music through bluetooth connections

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hfa8592

I have four Echo devices in various rooms of my home.  Two of them are always connected to bluetooth enabled A/V systems to play music through those systems. 

I created a group with the intent of linking all four Echos to play whole house music at the same time, but when I did that, the Echos that are connected via bluetooth to A/V systems would only play music on the Echo's built-in speakers, and not through the bluetooth connections. 

I have subsequently read that when grouping Echos to be used as a distributed audio system, they automatically disconnect all bluetooth connections, so they cannot play through my A/V systems as I intended.   Major disappointment. 

Why is that?

For obvious reasons, the speakers in my indoor and outdoor A/V systems are far superior to the tiny speakers in the Echo devices themselves, and therefore it is totally undesirable for me to play the music only on the Echo speakers.

Does anyone have any feedback as to why it is not possible to do what I am trying to do, are there any workarounds available?

Thanks,

Scott

Offline jwlv

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According to Amazon, the reason why Bluetooth is disabled when playing music on a group of Echoes is because many Bluetooth devices have a wide range of delays. One speaker could be playing near real-time while another is delayed by 1 or 2 seconds. If the music is playing on several Bluetooth speakers the music would be way out of sync.

This isn't the fault of the Echo devices, but rather the Bluetooth receiver/speaker. So I guess Amazon just threw up their hands and disabled it since it's nothing they can fix. And also to avoid lots of complaints and negative reviews for something that's not even Amazon's fault.

hfa8592

What's interesting about that is that, for example, is that I can tell one Echo that's connected via bluetooth to an A/V system inside the home to play Serius XM "Lithium" in the house...and then I can go outside and tell another Echo to play Serius XM "Lithium" in the back yard, also through that A/V system.  And they will both do what I asked, however there will be, as you noted, a lag.   So while they are both playing the exact same song, one will be a second or two behind the other even though the feed from Serius XM is identical.  This is true whether the Echo devices are playing through bluetooth or through their own internal speakers.   
« Last Edit: October 02, 2018, 12:19:33 pm by hfa8592 »