HomeTech.fm - Episode 375 - Whole House Audio in 2022

Episode Date: February 12, 2022

On this episode of HomeTech: Orro drops a new product at a new lower price, Disney Plus experiments with live TV, FuboTV is trying to keep you longer, and a long discussion on the state of whole house audio in 2022. All this and of course a pick of the week...

This is the Hometech Podcast for Friday, February 11th. Get ready for Valentine's Day, don't forget. From Sarasota, Florida, Seth Johnson. From Palo, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. Alright, and welcome to Hometech Podcast, a podcast all about all aspects of home technology and home automation. This week, we've got a couple of very few things that have happened over the last week in the realm of home technologies. But I think we're going to have a quick conversation about kind of the state of whole house audio in the year 2022 and see what we're all of our thoughts are on that um later on but gavin first up uh you had

a victory this week and we we've just gotta we've gotta say congratulations on your on your printer victory man good job you know like this has been something i've been working on for a long time and as tj said you never solve a printer problem. So I'm just hoping it's just works enough. But, you know, the worst part about this whole thing is I finally got the air print working on my unified system. I just don't know how. Right. I've been making notes and everything, but I wasn't rebooting in between some of these changes. So I don't know which one of these changes caused it to work, but it's working now. And I'm going to start going backwards and try and figure out if I can break it again. So it feels good to be able to print whenever I want right now. Printers are somehow still one of the worst devices in 2022. I don't understand why nobody has marketed like just an easy to use and like functional printer. I think Brother is the only one that I reliably use.

And they're not the most attractive devices in the world, but they just continue working with wifi and ethernet. So just shocking that we're still having this problem. The worst part that drives me nuts though, is my neighbors have some old school dummy printer hooked up to their computer and they never have problems. Right. It's just me, my Wi-Fi, my air print. All I want to do is air print from my phone. I'm sure they just have like there's somebody I did a unified system for and I go and like

update it from time to time. And it was kind of a favor job. And I go and I look at it and, um, there's, there's one client and one printer and that's it. So yeah, on bigger networks where there's a lot of stuff going on, there's, there's a lot more ways things can fail and you know, it's, it always sucks. I will also, you know, scream from the, the, the, the, the, what the mountaintops, I guess about brother laser printers specifically. Um, I have had one of those for, I don't know, a couple of years now it was a hundred dollars, maybe $89 or something like that. Um, you can get the little refills on Amazon, like the generic refills and print thousands of pieces of paper with no problem. So, uh, yeah, way better than, um, the inkjet ones, but they don't, it doesn't print photos very well. Cause it uses the old, it uses like led,

what is it called? Led toner, whatever it is. Laser, I guess it's like led, not a laser, but, um, yeah, not good for pictures, good for documents and just printing everything else. Well, the major main advantage with the laser jet too, is you don't have to worry about the ink drying out. It uses a powder that gets heated up during the whole process. So the biggest issue with a lot of people's printers is they buy the cheap printers, you know, $50 to $100, and then they don't use it for six months to a year,

and then it dries out. And LaserJets don't have that problem. Right. So this is hopefully the last time you're going to hear me talking about my printer issues on the show. You know, and listeners, if you really want to continue the conversation,

just join us on the Slack channel. I'm always down for some printer talk. You know, we have a great conversation with Robert going on right now on the side thread. So we'll continue it there. Yeah, we'll find out next week in Printer Talk. But what do you say, guys? We jump into some Home Tech headlines.

Let's do it. Let's do it. Oro announced this week a new product engineered to provide homeowners with the same experience as the Oro One smart lighting switch at a more accessible price point. The Oro S will contain the same sensors and function much the same way

as the Oro 1, but without the fancy touchscreen interface on it. The Oro explains that the new switch contains sensors for motion detection, sound, light, and responds with just the right amount of light when homeowners need the lighting the most. So it's got like a little automated thing in there. The Auro S also learns and adapts to the homeowner's habits, preferences to reduce lighting usage by as much as 80% the company claims. According to Auro, the new Auro S can be used as a standalone lighting control device, or it can be used in tandem with the Aura 1 as a mix and match, you know,

to support the ability to create a customized lighting experience throughout the house. The S is gonna be available for pre-order right now for $149. And just for reference, the Aura 1 is still priced at $299. So Gavin, what do you think? Is two $250 light switch in your radar, on your radar?

Oh, the first thing you got to remember, that's 150 US, right? So we're now looking at the 250 mark Canadian, right? So per switch, no. And then on top of that, when it comes to light switches, I don't like to mess with, these are great looking light switches like if i was like living alone i would probably look at something like this but i don't like to mess with the light switches because people are very get very intimidated if they look at this thing and all of a sudden it's a touch screen they don't want to touch it and turn it on and i want my mom you know, whoever, come in the house and just have a standard light switch that, you know, has the smarts kind of hidden. I like it like that. Yeah, I love to see these devices come out, though.

I'm definitely not the target audience for this either. But I like to see all-in-one devices come out that kind of solve multiple problems at the same time. And that's what we're going to hopefully start seeing is a lot of these devices with the smarts built into them. And that way you're not sending everything either outwards or just some other more refined way of doing that. Everything works faster that way too, where you don't have the latency of the internet.

It's shorter these days. They've done a lot of work to get latency going out to like the Amazon servers and whatnot. They've done a really good job of minimizing that, but it's still longer than you expect when you, like the expectation is how it used to be. You go up to the wall, you flip the switch and the light turns on. That's instant. We've added this latency in for smart home devices. That's a few hundred or maybe a few tens of milliseconds for local control, hundreds of seconds for external, like, um, voice control

through, um, you know, the echo, uh, Alexisism or Google and that kind of thing. Um, but yeah, I think it kind of falls back in line with, it's a better experience overall if something is local and can be locally controlled. And I'm hoping that this is Matter compatible because it would be nice if it's a, what was the term again? An edge router in the Matter network. And then that panel is configurable to control your other Matter products. I could see that being really nice.

I don't know if it's Matter. I haven't seen the Matter mentioned, but hopefully they do have that in the plans. I would be interested to know how many of these are actually selling, the touchscreen ones specifically. If you're in the professional space, you probably have been in many houses that have older, smaller touchscreens throughout the house that no longer work or they're just not that great. So I'd be curious to know how many people are actually installing these. They look like good devices.

They look like they function well and everything. But at the end of the day, do consumers really want small touchscreens on their walls? Quick follow-up here. Gavin, I just did a quick search on their community. Quick bit of follow-up here. Gavin, I just did a quick search on their community support here. And somebody was asking about HomeKit and it says, we'll be looking into working

with chip slash matter protocols for future integration. Since this is a new direction for some of the larger smart home partners, we're pursuing that connection rather than HomeKit. And a word of advice to people, do not buy products based on future promises.

You never know if it will come or when it will come. You know, buy it based on what it offers now. Yeah, even if they say that it has it built into it and has the logo and all this stuff, and if you get it and it doesn't have it, return it because it doesn't have it. It doesn't exist in your hands. It does not exist. So yeah, good point. Very good point. I used to say that all the time. Don't buy what doesn't exist. Just empty promises like NFTs and stuff. All right. Let's

move on. All right. Disney Plus is experienced with live streams dedicating its first to the Academy Award nominations. This was Disney's first live test, and it was accessible by all Disney Plus subscribers. I actually saw it pop up on my screen. I'm like, that's kind of weird that they'd have that there. It was here in the US. The company spokesman, Christy Adler, told The Verge the company did not have any further details to share about the live streaming anything in the future. But Disney did tell The Verge, we are pleased with the results and will continue to test as part of our ongoing

and iterative approach to deliver the best user experience to consumers. So, yeah, I mean, kind of makes sense, I guess. Disney has a couple of like, they have Hulu and ESPN Plus, right? So they already have live streaming products that exist kind of outside the Disney Plus app. Kind of makes sense that they borrow some of that technology for something. I don't know. I wouldn't say that the Oscar nominations event is something that's like a like a Super

Bowl or something. If they're if they're testing the waters on live stream, it's probably a show that that is going to get some traction, but not necessarily going to break the waters on live streaming. It's probably a, um, uh, a show that, that is going to get some traction, but not necessarily going to break the bank on, you know, if it, or gain headlines, if it completely falls flat on his face and crashes the app for everyone, which has happened a number of times for like YouTube and, and Hulu and all those. So, um, Gavin, how do you, what do you think about this? Another, another live service, another subscription for you. I know. What do you think about it? I like their their foray into the live streaming.

I like the service. I'm actually surprised other services aren't doing it as much. But I like to see that they're offering more than just like video on demand, because that's one of the things I always found once you cut the cord is starting like news. I'd like to see them get into streaming news and stuff like that. Maybe live as well. And these events, you know, sports has been tough. You know, certain things. And, you know, if they're just testing it now, I'm curious what their plans are for the future if it all works out.

Stuff like this totally makes sense to me. And it seems like a natural progression and what we need and actually to make streaming TV a replacement for live TV or cable TV for that matter. And this actually reminds me of something that James in the Slack channel linked up the other day called Dreamstage.live, where they put on different performances and comedy shows and stuff like that. So this is becoming a bigger sector over time. And the prices for Dreamstage are not bad. I think it's like $20 a ticket or something like that. So I think we're going to start seeing more of these live performances pop up. And especially as COVID keeps going around the world right now, people are going to still seek that indoor entertainment. I meant to save that as my pick of the week.

That's what I wanted to be pick of the week this week. So, you know, there we go. Free one for the crowd here. This this is a really cool service. It really is. Right now they're doing like you like you said, you can go buy a ticket for a live performance. They must set up a little small production company inside there to capture the video and audio of something that's going on in places that – I mean, theater is hit pretty hard, right? It's pretty hard by the COVID and all the stuff that's going on. I know that most theaters still require that you show a license and a test or something right now.

Like the Broadway rules are out there that you have to show a testing that you've taken a test and you're COVID free or whatever. So you can get in there. They're pretty still pretty cautious on all that stuff. This this would be great for somebody who, you know, doesn't want to go through that whole rigmarole, but still wants to go see something that's going on and get a nice, you know, have a nice seat in the house. You don't have to get up, go out to the, to the, to the, the big theater and sitting up a big crowd of people, um, for two hours. And you can sit here and watch it in the comfort of your own home. And, and I really, I really liked this. I also noticed on the bottom of this, which I was kind of really, really excited about,

was that there was a play on Dream Stage. So Dream Stage is actually going to be opening up their ticketing platform for other artists. So you may actually have this expand out to your local venues, live venues, and that kind of thing, where they could sell tickets and everything on here. So this should have been my pick of the week. But man, what a really cool thing. I'm glad James brought it up. That's the value of the hub, right? Like all that info goes by in there. And yeah, thanks for bringing that back up. I'm going to have to save this now. Bookmark. One of the things I saw during COVID was these live events being held. There was on Instagram, it was called Versus TV, and they would bring two artists together and they, you know, highlight their biggest songs from, I guess it could have been 90s artists, 2000s artists.

And the thing about it, it was free, but they had a million people tuned in to watch it. And it kind of changed the whole, like, this is an actual business model. This is something we can do. And I think that's where this leads into. I would pay to see one of my favorite artists in a live concert, right? I think that would be great. And watching it from home with my family and then just enjoying it, that's awesome. Yeah, absolutely. Especially if it helps move and further whatever career art that's out there. I'm all for that because, yeah, we need more art in this world. There you go. Well, speaking of live TV,

FuboTV is temporarily testing a new quarterly format that lumps together three months of service all at once rather than the monthly subscriptions it usually offers. The change conveniently arrives just in time for two of the biggest sports events of the year, Super Bowl LVI, and I don't know what that is. LVI must be 56, I guess. Roman numerals. And the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, which I have to talk about here and rant that I can't watch. Still ridiculous. All right.

This temporary pricing has been launched a few days ago and is expected to kind of wrap up on February 17th. The test does not affect existing subscribers and isn't available on every platform. But it's actually on most of FuboTV's platforms. They're offering this plan as default so kind of uh kind of a an in-run around people who who are like yeah i want to watch the super bowl i want to watch the olympics i'm only going to pay you for one month no no no you're going to pay us for three months and then and then yeah then you're out but it's pretty interesting like uh i don't know i'd probably just pay one month call it a day yeah i i could see what they're doing it's like yeah we'll get you in using the super bowl but stick around and see if we have something good and um

i think with disney plus that's how i felt you know at first i was signing up what was it for at first there was something they were offering. Mandalorian. Yes. And then I was like, all right, I'll watch that, and I'm going to get off the service. And you know what? I hung around because when I started seeing the other stuff they were offering, it was great. And I'm still there watching it. So I can see them doing it, and it will work out for them. I think it's an interesting concept if you are into sports or something that does happen seasonally where you don't need a subscription for the whole time. For example, we could watch NFL games here, but finding a subscription for

that service for the entire season is a little difficult depending on what games you want to watch. So if there was a streaming service that just offered that in a chunk, uh, for the entire NFL season or something like that, that would be appealing to me. LVI is indeed 56. Thank you, Google. Uh, but yeah, I don't know. Uh, so winter Olympics still awful in the States here, uh, NBC, it should honestly be a war crime for what they've done to the production of that it's again in china which is pretty much 12 it's 12 hours behind us so like we could actually be watching live things at decent times of the day but no they pre-record them they chop things up to in the most absurd ways and then feed you little spoonfuls of

what they want to show with the most horrible commentary over the top of it. And yeah, the Olympics here in the States, at least the TV coverage is just, just horrible. I, I, I haven't had a chance to go and figure out how to do the VPN thing that I tried to do before to catch the Australian feeds. Cause everybody says Australian feeds are the ones to get but I'm just being lazy and there's other stuff going on and the worst part about all of that is uh you'll get spoiled like even if you wait for the recorded ones you've already heard through the news or social media who won what and that will just drive you nuts because you can't avoid it you know there's no way of avoiding it. It's a shame that you, I feel so, I feel bad for you. I have no interest in the Winter Olympics personally.

I usually did before, but for some reason this year, I just, I don't know. I just didn't feel like I was interested in watching. It's a weird year this year, but. Yeah. Yeah. If NBC did anything like what the, I think it's channel four there in Australia or something was doing. I mean, they just basically had in their app every single event that you could just,

you could just watch, you could just sit there and watch it. Whatever event you want to pull up, it was just a live feed. I don't think very many of them had like people commentating over it. If they did, they were experts in the field. They weren't the,

you know, four people that are assigned to work the event and generically talk about, uh, athletes. So it's like, I don't know, like it seemed like it was just a better coverage overall, but we, we have this just strange, really strange, like Olympics coverage here in the States. And it's no fun to watch. It really is no fun. Like give me the sport. I don't want to see, uh, I don't want to see all this, and little side stories about somebody growing up. Just show me what's going on. It should be live.

I don't get it. I will subscribe to whatever streaming service allows an average person to do the events before the professionals do it. That way I can see how impressive it is. Whoever does that will get my money that would be uh that'd be interesting that was a guy from montana doing the jump and he broke his leg i think you would appreciate a professional doing that man they are really good yeah just fly somebody out there and then say all right you're on the high jump here's your here's your uh you're you're supposed to run up here and jump backwards over that pole that's up there uh wait a second uh no i don't think i can do that uh the

the gymnastics thing would be pretty good too all right well uh moving on here all the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found on our show notes at hometech.fm slash 375. Once again, that link is hometech.fm slash 375. And as I teased at the top of the show, we're going to have a quick conversation about the state of home audio in 2022 and kind of like what our thoughts are on it. We, we've, we've have, we have a couple of these topics kind of sitting around and that we, we talk about quite a bit before the show and I have to remind them, no, save, save these conversations, Matt, for, for during the show when we're actually recording. So we can,

we can get these out to people and they can listen to us talk. Uh, but we, we we've started to write all this stuff down and kind of get like an outline of, of things to talk about and, and ideas and questions to bring up here to the listening audience. And maybe you guys out there can, can offer suggestions back about things that we talk about too. Um, but kind of just starting at a, at a lowest, the lowest level for home house audio, uh, let's see. Yeah. Wiring or wireless. That's right. So yeah. Wiring like hard wires in the walls or wireless speakers, which one do you go with? That's always been kind of like the, uh, the

eternal question on, uh, for, for me as a, as a pro, when I, when I was doing this, you know, everything was going wireless is what everybody would say. That was like the catchphrase. It's like trademark somewhere. Everything's going wireless. Why do I need wires? And, um, yeah, that, that, that's what, that's what I'd hear most of the time. TJ, you're in the business. Do you still hear that? Is that still the catchphrase? It's all wireless. Everything is wireless. It's amazing how often you hear that. And what a lot of people don't realize for some reason is that even wireless needs wires to get there, right? So like your Wi-Fi is wired at some point. Your wireless speakers are wired at some point.

So all this stuff still requires wires at some point. It's just what you prefer to use in the long run. Yeah, because if you get a wireless Sonos speaker, it's still got a power cord. It still needs a wire to it. And it could be one way if you did a hardware system. Yeah, needs a wire to it. And it, you know, it could be a, could be one way, one way if you did a hardwire system, yeah, you got to buy a speaker and an amp, but the wire to get there is not Romex. It doesn't, you know, leave a mark on the wall or, you know, you can move it around, you can cover it up and make it go away too. Like if you don't

want it. So yeah, it's a completely different beast. At least pre-wiring a house for wiring was, was always my push, you know, Hey, it doesn't cost anything now, but it's a completely different beast. At least pre-wiring a house for wiring was always my push. You know, hey, it doesn't cost anything now, but it's impossible to do later. Virtually impossible. Like, you're not going to want us to come back and tear apart your house. So let's get the wire in, and then maybe down the road you can use it. But if you don't have to, you can use something else. You can go wireless and put something in wireless.

Gavin, you're on the DIY side. I assume you're all wireless. Do you have any wired product? Well, my rule of thumb for everything is I see how I can wire it first. I push to get wired, especially for heavy lifting devices. So streaming devices such as the speakers or movie boxes, all hardwired. And I try and offload, you know, on my wireless setup, I try and put certain things, right? That being said, I do have like cameras and stuff. So I've invested heavily in my Wi-Fi setup just to make sure it can handle this kind of network. So the camera, so okay, speakers, you don't have no wireless wired speakers, like in ceiling speakers, like built-in speakers or anything like that?

No, all my speakers are all just like a box with a power cord. Gotcha. And then, so for cameras and stuff, it sounds like they're wireless too, as in like they plug in and get on Wi-Fi. Yeah. Most of them, I have one maybe hardwired. Gotcha. Okay, cool. And I would say that's most people.

And slowly becoming me, as we'll probably talk about later here in the show, of all the new stuff that I've kind of been playing around with recently. But yeah, the convenience of wireless is amazing. You don't have to pre-plan for it. You can impulse buy, or I can impulse buy and get a bunch of things and, and, and get them in. And yeah, all of a sudden I have a bunch of lights around the house now. Okay. Um, great. Uh, but it's, it's, it's not something that I had to plan for. Like it just took two screws and I was done and that that's amazing. Um, but kind of going back to like the reliability and,

and, and, um, just like, uh, bespoke nature of like hardwiring things. Um, you know, there's, there's all sorts of different speaker options. Oh man, the speaker options. Yeah. I am not a speaker person. If, if you've ever, I mean, I, I like speaker, I like sound, I like good audio. Um, but I, I have always been the transducer is just a transducer crowd. Um, but I, I will gravitate towards something that sounds better, like a Sonos system over listening to, you know, a soda can, like an Amazon echo. Like I want to have better music. I know what good music sounds like. I know what live music sounds like. So I'm going to gravitate that direction. But, you know, in the house for background audio, I don't think that you know, my personal opinion is that you probably don't need

five thousand dollar powered in wall speakers from, you know, studio monitor grade speakers for background music. That's just not the right application for that. I get that some people want it, but it's never been my thing. So I've always been like, Hey, you've got these mid range speakers you can put in, you can go higher, you can go lower. Um, but here are your options there. And then a lot of people actually these days and designers really like the invisible speakers. So we have a lot of options there. Um, they're better than they used to be at least. Yeah. And that's what I wanted to bring up too, is you really, there's two big options you have with doing wired speakers, right? You have the customization, uh, option. So you can do things like invisible speakers that you just brought up. Um, you can do landscape speakers that kind of

like surround a pool or patio area. So that way you get, you know, good sound all throughout the whole place. Um, well, hold on, hold on. on you gotta stop on landscape speakers because i don't think i i don't this trend has not hit diy and it's it's massive for integrators because i don't think people realize how awesome a landscape speaker system is we're talking about like four to six inch speakers that look like um those like landscape lights that you have out there, like the little brown lights that shine up into the trees. They look just like that, except there's a speaker inside there and they're about six inches big. And then there's there's like usually a subwoofer that or two that get put in depending on the size of the property or the

area. And that could be just like sitting on the ground, but the better ones actually get buried down in the ground. And all you see is this little like smoke sack coming out of the ground. You don't even know it's there. And it gets buried in there, buried behind all the plants. And somehow you're sitting out of the pool and there's just like this massive wall of energy around you. And it sounds, those systems sound amazing. Uh, everyone that I've turned them onto ends up adding more speakers, uh, because they're, they're like commercial systems. They're like 70 volts. So you can add, add more speakers onto them. And the more speakers you add, the better it sounds because you can actually lower the noise. You raises the noise

floor of whatever it makes the sound pressure level level the same uniform around the whole thing. So it's a really good system. And yeah, TJ, I didn't mean to steal your thought or anything, but I just wanted to break in. Those systems are awesome. And I haven't seen them hit DIY or anywhere near DIY at all yet. And I think once you guys get a hold of them, Gavin, you're going to be blown away by what you can do with these. See, we're spending your money. Yeah. You know, you guys introduced me to these in the hub and i was ready to spend some money but then i thought um my neighbors might go crazy if you know i turn these up and it's outdoors but then i also saw on the hub they had speakers where it was directional where you can say only hear the sound at this spot and And I was amazed at that technology

because then you could just have it around your pool, your deck, just at your barbecue. Then I saw the cost and yeah, it's not for do-it-yourselfers. Yep, yeah. The pricing's still up there because I think it's still a premium product. There's not much demand for it.

There's a ton of demands for those horrible rock speakers. And if anybody has those and you know what I'm talking about, because they don't sound good, but those are, those are probably what your neighbors think you're going to have. You're going to have those rock speakers. The system that TJ is talking about doesn't sound anything like those rock speakers and you can actually play it at a lower level and it's still audible to you, but not your neighbors. So that's, that's what actually makes it, you know, I'm going to sell, I'm going to get you you. I'm going to get you one. I'm going to get you one. We're going to get you to put in.

For free? Well, I mean, I don't know. We'll find somebody. You said you're going to get me one. This is being recorded. Do not edit it out. You're going to get me one. We can work a deal out, Gavin.

I got to come to Canada this year anyway. There you go. But the second point I really wanted to bring up about wired speakers is upgrade ability, right? Um, what's really nice. And you go into like these older houses that, that maybe added wired speakers in the ceiling or in the wall. Um, maybe the speakers don't work anymore or they kind of just look awful. You can easily replace those speakers with new ones and then add whatever smarts you want to it. Um, so if you just wanted a basic amplifier, um, you know, you wouldn't be looking at that much money to do that. Um, if you wanted to add

like a Sonos amplifier, that way you could control each, uh, zone of speakers individually. Um, that would be relatively easy as well because you already have the speakers there. Um, so it really upgrades your options for what you can upgrade to in the future in terms of streaming services and all that good stuff as well. With a wireless speaker, you're kind of locked down to their ecosystem. So, you know, as much as I like Sonos, if Sonos were to go out, you know, Sonos products probably wouldn't work anymore. You could just change the hardware at the end of the speakers. Right, right. Yeah. No, that makes sense. That makes sense. And yeah yeah there's

something the amplifiers have been around for forever i mean it's as soon as the audio came around amplifiers are around so like it's not and the technology hasn't changed at all so um yeah i i would i would say uh look into that i'm trying to actually look on lollibaba for a frog speaker that I ran across a couple of years ago. And that was just simply amazing. What is the 70 volt frog speaker? And maybe.

Is that like a shape of a frog? It's beautiful. I just, I'm going to find this thing. I'm going to give it, I'm going to, we're going to get one and get it, get it to Gavin there in Canada.

He could put it around his pool. Yeah. Anyway. So kind of moving on from, uh oh that's beautiful um yeah alibaba it's got some strange things on there so there you go i'm gonna i'm gonna spec those in now 15 bucks i mean that's a pretty good deal there you go it's got a little, like looking at you curiously. Yeah, that's our show art for this week. $15. You got to buy three and a half of them, though. So make sure you get it right.

My mom would name them and everything. She'd love them. Could you imagine walking out to somebody's patio and they just have like 30 of these around the patio? You're like, what are you doing? It's amazing. Why is there so many frogs? Hey, but listen to this and they turn it up. Yeah, it's great. My neighbors

hate me. All right. So we've mentioned a couple of times, um, wireless options. I think all three of us are just like, so no, so no, so no to a T a T. Like there's not very much difference there. But what Gavin, I think you brought up is how we implement them in our house, how we implement a Sonos system in the house. Yeah, so there's more to it than just the system. You know, when I was doing my home system, I also wanted to look at, you know,

like the flexibility. So I went with Sonos because of AirPlay 2. We're an Apple home. AirPlay 2 allows us to AirPlay to any speakers, multiple speakers at the same time. Or I could AirPlay in one room, wife AirPlays in another room. At the same time, we listen to our own things. You know, it works really well. Now, for those, if you're looking into AirPlay devices, whatever you settle on, just make sure you have the similar brand.

Because I found when you mix up the brands, they don't stay in sync as nice. So the Sonos, when it's in sync, I have it going through my whole house. It sounds really nice to walk through the house with it playing. So there's a lot about control. I just wanted to make it easy. Whatever I'm listening to on my phone, a podcast, you know, I just want to send it to whatever speaker I want. It's just that easy. You utilize the AirPlay portion of it more than the streaming services? We don't use the streaming services at all. Really?

Yeah, both of us, we have podcast players on our phone. We sign up to our favorite podcast and we just send whatever we're listening to to the speakers we want to listen to it on um the streaming services um you know if we have to we can airplay those two for the most part um but we utilize podcasts we listen to you know home tech fm all the time i mean that's the only podcast. It's a great show. You know, I love hearing myself, you know, and the wife will have certain DJs she'll follow and they put out mixes and she just listens to those, you know, and again, you could be in the kitchen and then send it upstairs and you'll walk upstairs and it's playing upstairs already, you know,

or sometimes when nobody's home, I just play it through the whole house and it's nice. Excellent. Excellent. TJ and I are trading back and forth. Frog and squirrel speakers now. We found a squirrel speaker on Alibaba, which is $65 a piece. That's ridiculous, but it is 70 volts. This new frog one you linked is 360 sound.

I mean, that's pretty impressive. My favorite picture of that one is it's the Photoshop of it in the grass with the circle and the arrow and it says speaker. Vivid animal shape. All right. Moving on from that, I would say like the biggest difference I think I have is when I go, at least when I was designing homes and designing homes, I would go for in-wall speakers with the Sonos amp. And Gavin, like you're saying it opens

Sonos, you can use the airplay like you're using it, but it also opens up the ability to add those streaming services in which, you know, most people want to have access to Spotify or, um, you know, uh, uh, I would say Apple music, but probably not. Um, like maybe Pandora, I guess is probably really popular here with our, our aging crowd. Like it was one of the first streaming services. It's a little bit more popular, um, with, with, uh, with the older crowd just because they, they've had the account set up for years and they know what Pandora is. They can go log in and hit play and it plays all their radio stations. So I see that one a lot. And I see a tune in radio for radio, like tuning in radio. I can tell you when I started in this industry, um, we were, we were running like antennas up into people's walls to catch, you know, uh, radio

signal and FM FM was iffy, even with that in there, like with these 30, 45 foot antennas that we were running, um, the, uh, the AM was just out. Like it was just not going to happen. We had so many people like, well, where's the AM radio? I'm like, well, you don't, you necessarily, you don't get that. And that's, you, you live in a brick house that's, you know, encased in this, like, um, you know, fiber, this, this mesh for your stucco and everything. Like you're just, you're a Faraday cage. You're not, you're not getting AM signal into this house at all. Um, tune in really changed the game on that so as soon as receivers started to have it we were able to kind of like program around that but sonos really changed the game for making it easy for

somebody to tune in to a radio broadcast that they could hear and we use tune in on our phones we do use tune in on our phones and i just airplay it to whatever speakers i want as well right why. Why don't you use the Sonos? You don't have to use your phone. I don't get it. I don't, it's the whole point. Well, no, but the, the, you, either way, you still have to use the phone. Right. Um, if I go to the Sonos app, I still need to use the Sonos app, whatever. Right. But at least if I go with the phone, it's one interface for everything. So no matter where she could be listening to a podcast, you just AirPlay it. It's built in and it's AirPlay 2. So it has everything where you choose the rooms you want and you can control the speakers in groups and everything's built in in the AirPlay.

And I like it that way. It works easy. It's familiar. We just use the Spotify app ourselves. Unless I need to group different speakers together, it's all Spotify. And the nice thing about Sonos too, is you can just walk up and touch the play button or whatever for a couple of seconds and it groups the speakers. So we hardly ever open the Sonos app. Yeah, I didn't know you could do that, but ours are kind of spaced around the house and under furniture, so it'd be kind of difficult to press buttons on them. But we always use the Sonos app because it offloads the music from your phone and direct streams in.

It's like Spotify app does that automatically. I always just go to the Sonos interface and hit play there. And then I can do whatever I want on my phone without interrupting whatever's playing in the room. So I don't know. Gavin, I know you like it like that, but why don't you try it? Give it a shot. Give it a shot. I have given it a shot, but then it's a learning curve. The offloading is a big piece because then the speakers connect directly instead of the phone sending it to the speaker. I understand that, but I've invested in a good wireless network.

I'm utilizing this thing. The bit per dollar is getting lower. Yes, I'm getting my money's worth, so I don't worry about that. But like I said, we're not tied to one service. We use multiple services and they've never really come down from that. Very rarely can you catch a deal on Sonos equipment, right? But it's, and it is nice when they do have it. And I've gone to Target and bought below my dealer cost, you know, product from Target, below dealer cost from Sonos. So I have a couple of pieces in the house that are like that. But the biggest advantage to Sonos is the flexibility, whether you're doing a hardwired system, whether you already have infrastructure for that and you just want to put an amplifier in or you have no infrastructure,

you want to put stuff around the house, you can do that. And it works really well for that. There's not too many other systems out there that can say they can do that. There's that one Denon makes or no, not Denon. Yeah. So there's, you got a couple other professional options you have are Yamaha MusicCast and Denon HEOS. And I don't think either, both of those are great options if you're integrating it with a control system like control for Crestron home, something like that. But as a standalone service, I think it kind of pales, uh, in comparison to Sonos. Yeah. And the integration side we've, we've with control for, we've had Sonos integration for years. We've been spoiled by that because one of the very early driver writers figured out how Sonos worked and did like an amazing job putting together

integration with it. And what ends up happening, though, was that I would bring my customers out of the control for experience and say, if you want house audio, use your Sonos app. If you want to control your AV and lighting and stuff, use the control for app. Now, the way the driver is written, they all work, they all sync, they all talk together. So if you went to control your av and lighting and stuff use the control 4 app now the way the driver is written they all work they all sync they all talk together so if you went to your control 4 touchscreen and you had initiated something from the sonos app it was synced it worked you could hit pause over here it would pause over there that's that's that was one of the the best things about the integration but i i always thought that sonos actually had a better way of getting into your music or to playing something throughout the house than Control 4 did. And again, we were using the touchscreens on the wall that TJ was talking about earlier.

They weren't very fast or very good. So it was like, yeah, use your phone. It's got a real processor in it. They know what they're doing over at Apple and Android. They can do this right. Good old resistive touchscreens as well. Yeah. Yeah.

Yes. Yeah. Never, never a good thing. I had one, somebody sent me a picture of one the other day. I was like, there was liquid pouring out of the touchscreen down the wall. I don't know what happened, but liquid. Yeah. It was an old, old touchscreen, but yeah.

A lot of people like to kind of complain about the price of Sonos. And I understood this argument before I used Sonos, right? Because if you look at a Sonos product, $200 for a wireless speaker is a lot of money. And then you look at like the Sonos Arc, which now is what, $800, $900. And you look at that and you compare it to other audio products and you think, man, why is that so expensive, right? But you're really paying for the support and the firmware updates that you get with the life of the product. Minus the separation of the S2 to S1 app that happened a couple of years ago, a lot of Sonos products last 10 years or if not longer. And even with the separation of the S2 and S1 app,

you can still use those devices. They're just not compatible with newer stuff. Um, so in terms of how long you get to actually use your devices and stuff, I don't think Sonos is a bad value. No, I will add to that. Um, TJ, you sent me, what was that thing? It was a, it was an amp, one of the old sonos amps like the first generation sonos amps i can't remember the name i think it's a beast yeah it was huge uh it's got the five port switch or four port switch in the back of it it's got audio options for both speaker and line outputs like i can't remember the model number of it off the top of my head it was actually before i started selling sonos they had these things out. So this is two models back, probably 2010 timeframe. I don't know. It's a long time ago.

10 year old speaker, amplifier. I got on the phone with Sonos. I was like, DJ said he couldn't get this thing to work. I bet I can get it to work. I couldn't. So I got on the phone with Sonos. I did all the tricks that I remembered how to do from 2010, 2015. And, um, so yeah, I got on the phone with Sonos. This guy wouldn't let me off the phone. I'm like, no, no, it's cool, man. I don't need this to work. No, he, he wanted to try everything under the, under the sun to make sure that we could get this thing online. And it just, it wasn't having it. So something inside of it is the, the networking card is probably broken or something. Um, but it, it would get online. It just wouldn't get a URL from the outside world. It just would not do it. And okay. We,

we tracked it all down. I'm like, Hey man, that's cool. He's like, no, no, let's try one more thing. I got one more thing. No, man, I want to get the, these guys are relentless. They wanted me, they wanted to fix it up. I cannot praise a company more for the, for the support than something like sonos lutron probably too but man they they've done a great job so yeah he's posting pictures of this this beast yeah that was that was the sonos zp100 which was released in 2005 so yeah so the fact that they were willing to even take your call about this product you know 17 years later is very impressive very and euro support used to be very similar before

they got acquired by you know amazon so i i like that kind of support but they're not the same well i i want to move off of uh move off of sonos because we can talk about sonos on it i think um i got one more thing one more thing when. When I would do surround sound systems in living rooms, it was very popular to do like a living room surround. That eventually shifted for me doing like a custom Leon soundbar that matched the exact width of the TV with an audio system, Yamaha or Sony ES amplifier, just the whole nine yards to just doing Sonos. I just do Sonos.

I put an amp in. I put the soundbar in. I put a sub in. It's wireless. I can put the sub anywhere in the room. It's small. It sounds great. Um, the price point was just about the same, but the install was so much easier. Like I was in and out, there was no, it was not hard to Mount, um, the Sonos and Leon came out with the tone case or whatever. So you could like, if somebody was very particular about how the Sonos thing looked, you could cover that up and look fine. So I will say like in my house right now,

I have the Sonos surround. It's 3.1, not 5.1 for reasons, but we enjoy that. And that is a great system. It costs a whole lot of money, but not as much compared to like a real audio system. Like if you were to buy a 5, one or seven, one system, it's probably about the same price as that. So I, it gets my thumbs up,

but I know that the price gets up there for, for what it is. And just a tip for, you know, when it comes to price, this is what I did is look on Craigslist, look on marketplace. There's people offloading like new Sonos equipment that they got as a gift and they just don't want it. And, you know, just keep an eye on it. And if you see something, know what you want, because you don't have time to decide when you see it. Just when you get it, see it, grab it. You get it for a good price. Piece your system together over time. You'll save a chunk of money money you can also think of getting the ikea sono speakers those are very affordable or also factor in the fact that a lot of them come

with the voice assistants built in so you don't need a voice assistant speaker and this that's another 30 bucks that you saved right there you know like any little thing you save helps yeah and you could really get a good deal on you sono stuff i picked up a play bar when the art came out for 200 bucks so you can cut that out if you want stuff i i'm i'm so mad at you guys right now you you know my problem you know my problem with used used equipment and and auction sites um luckily there's nothing on the government auction sites for these sonos speakers but i just ran across uh it's two sonos amps three play fives three play fives for uh 350 dollars is it the play fives are the new ones right oh these are the old played fives like the old like

the the white ones with the handle on it yep see those ones are good though because they have ox in and ox out and they just sound really good yep and they still work with the s1 app so there's no problem with using them they still work with spotify no airplay 2 though no airplay 2 on those well you guys just cost me 350 on this episode this is ridiculous all right moving on other products it's ridiculous man i'm so upset right now. Uh, those play five sound great. They do. I have one awesome speakers. All right. Uh, pro side, um, on the pro side, we have control for, uh, uh, Crestron, Elan, all of the professional products have some type of, uh, integration with sound services. Uh, control four has worked in the past couple of years

to bring in direct integrations to kind of move their dealers off of Sonos, like the Sonos addiction, and get them back into the Sonos. And I will say it's to the point where it's like, you can do Sonos, but if you want to do everything in the Control 4 ecosystem, it's okay there too.

And I think Crestron is pretty much the same way as well. Like, I don't know if Crestron has any direct integration with Sonos, but I know that they have some pretty superior products when it comes to streaming, amplifiers, that kind of thing. They have some pretty good stuff over there. Yeah, and Crestron Home actually has a really nice one too. It's called the DM-NAX,

and it's got eight speaker outputs and eight inputs as well, so you can do eight different streaming services all in that one little box. It comes in pretty expensive. I think it's, five to $6,000 at least and probably a year or two out on order. But it is an all-inclusive package and it works very nicely within the Crestron home system. Yeah. I do remember whatever the price of that one was, it was a great price for eight zones of audio and eight zone amplifier and everything that it did all in one. Um, because if you compared it to doing like an eight zone Sonos system, you'd need eight Sonos amplifiers and those are not inexpensive themselves. I think those are like

what, eight or $900 now. So, or if you're on Craigslist, they're just $350 and you get three wireless speakers with it. Anyway, yeah, it was a great price. But Control4 has kind of gone through many iterations, at least that I remember and kind of see these days. Now I think they have the same issues with inventory. I want to say they have problems getting some of their audio switches in switches in. Um, they've kind of monkeyed around with how many zones out, but when, when I was working in the control for world, everything was like eight zones,

16 zones, or four zones. Like you, you could do that many and that's it. Um, four zone systems, few and far between. I, I, I don't know if actually I have one of those amps for sale. If anybody wants to get in touch with me, I have somebody that needs to offload an amplifier, but, uh, yeah, um, the, um, the, the, the, the eight zone and the, really the 16 zone systems are where I lived. Um, and I, I don't think I've done anything. I don't think I did anything very much smaller than that other, other than just adding in Sonos. Um, I don't, I don't really know TJ, you're more in the, uh, in that crowd these days in the custom home field. What are people looking for when, like how many zones of audio are people looking for these days? I know the houses are

getting smaller. Yeah, it really depends on the size of the house you want and really how much technology you want inside of it. For a 5,000 square foot house, you can usually expect four to six zones of audio. Anything bigger than that, it's kind of up to the homeowner. We go into a lot of houses though, where it's four zones of audio. They have their kitchen, they have their living room, maybe an outside area, and then like a basement area and some people tie that into like a home theater setup or other ways to to distribute audio through there yeah yeah that's pretty that makes sense that makes sense gavin i i how many zones of audio do you have you've got to have more than 16 no no not more than 16 no no but i have them in all the common spaces, you know, around the house that we would sit in. And it's easy with Sonos to just expand as you need, right? But some of the other,

like, for other, like, devices in the house, I mean, you can, a lot of things are Bluetooth, have Bluetooth built in. So, you know, that's a very popular one. I don't like Bluetooth speakers just because whenever I walk too far away from them, they start to cut out and stuff like that, too. Right. But some things people, you know, look at your TV. My Roku TV recently added AirPlay to it, you know, so you never know what your devices can do in your house too so you know your sound bars they may have uh capabilities in them too that you can utilize for streaming from your phone or something like that right um those are some things to check out to see what you already have before you go buy a whole new system yeah there's a lot of um even a lot of tvs uh newer tvs now

that have Airplay two in them as well. So if you've got a couple of TVs in the rooms, maybe some soundbars connected to them, you could have a whole house audio system without even knowing about it. And then I know on the DIY side, like most of the time when I'm listening to other podcasts or listening to people talk about what they're doing for music around the house, they're talking about how they can get the music out of an Amazon echo or Google Home or dare I say a HomePod. That drives me nuts because those things sound awful. And I even bought one of the more expensive Amazon devices that were supposed to sound good, and it still doesn't even match up to my Ikea

Sonos speaker. So I just, I cannot sit around listening to those little pucks i guess if you just want to have background sounds you know they're all right but when you want to listen to music or hear my voice on the big speaker like you need something with some bass on it right there you go yeah when i'm listening to myself i't know. I don't have any bass in my voice. This whiny guy talking through his nose on the, on the podcast there. Yeah. Um, yeah. So having, having a better speaker is, you know, I, I mean, I don't know the Apple, the original air pot, uh, home pods that I have, um, sound pretty good. And we use those for our TV here in the garage. You've got them synced to an Apple TV. Um, they work well and pretty happy with them. Just about every time we watch TV out here, that's what we're using for. Um, not the best

experience because it's all wifi and like Apple's implementation between a home pod. They don't want to support and an older Apple TV that i'm using isn't the best but it does the job it for a garage tv it's not bad so i can't complain too much um i guess i have like here pros and cons for the diy stuff pros it's generally inexpensive or like you said gavin you have it laying around in the house already just don't know it um you can find deals you can find deals yeah yeah absolutely so and the cons of course probably the audio quality is probably the biggest one if that's something that's important if you just want background music in the background some of these don't sound terrible

especially the larger amazon devices and the home pods they don't sound terrible like the can ones they don't sound good the puck ones they don't sound good like the speaker ones like the ones that are bigger like little shelf things that you can put on there on your, on your, um, like the ones with the touchscreens on them, they sound okay. Um, at least at lower volume levels where they can kind of maintain, you know, what they're trying to do without adding distortion in and blowing up the little tiny two inch speaker inside of them. So, um, yeah. And one of the things that we kind of mentioned was a, was a, was a pro earlier in a con of these. A con of these is that they take up counter space. They take up space on a countertop.

So Sonos is a little bit different as it can kind of remove some of that, especially the professionally installed stuff. You get your counter space back and you get your equipment room back like you you can hide all the equipment away in a cabinet or a closet somewhere and it lives there and you don't ever have to see it or interact with it unless you need to like dust it off or do some maintenance or something like that so i wonder if there if there is an in-wall speaker where i can install it or not in wall even in rooftop ceiling top speaker um where i can install it next to a light, run a wire to that light for power. And then it's on the Sonos net, use Wi-Fi for Sonos. Like, is there something like that that exists?

That would be nice for do it yourself or because then you can easily put it in the ceiling. I'm just thinking out loud here, you know, my next project, maybe. The biggest problem, the biggest problem with a light speaker is that lights turn off. Maybe not when you want the speakers to turn off. So like, there's been plenty of those light speakers and people have been trying to make light bulb speakers for a while. And I think there's actually a professionally, like I talked to him not too long ago about coming on the show. Um, but they're over in the UK and that they are like an extremely expensive light speaker, uh, for super high end installations and like museum area or commercial settings where you'd want to have some some fancy fixtures, but also get some really quality audio.

They make them. But man, you you you will pay for them. And it's an interesting, interesting product. Has, you know, the full RGB W light inside of it and, and a good sounding speaker, James actually in the, in the hub turned me onto them. Um, but they're, they're not here in the States yet. So we kind of decided to kind of touch back, but back later, whenever they were trying to market over here, uh, we could talk about them a little bit more. Um, can't remember the name right now, but I did talk to him, uh, maybe a year ago or so. Um, anyway, I think that kind of wraps up our conversation here about whole house audio. It's pretty good conversation lasts a little bit longer than I thought it was going to.

But, uh, if you, if you are listening and you think we should probably touch on one of these topics like this and just have, what we're doing is just sitting around having a conversation, um, come to the conversation and ask a question or, you know, say, Hey, you didn't talk about this. And I use this every single day and I love it. Um, let us know. Cause I'm, I'm very interested in that kind of stuff right now. Um, I, again, I don't, I'm not a professional installer anymore. I don't, I kind of have access to equipment through back channels and that kind of thing, but for the most part, I'm shopping on Amazon, just like everybody else. So, uh, yeah, let what's really working out there for house audio these days if we didn't touch on it.

And it's not Sonos. Like, let me know. Let me know. And I'm interested if any of our listeners have used Bluesound or Aurelic. Aurelic is a new company I've never heard of. They make a couple of different streaming amplifiers and in-wall speakers that kind of thing um so if you're listening to the podcast and you've used blue sound or you've used a relic um let us know in an email all right pick of the week uh i i've got one i i guess i i i i needed to add some things onto in order to get free shipping and um i got these

ring solar powered wall lights have you guys seen these things i have not they're they're they have them at home depot and they're like let's see they're 80 a piece no no they're 80 with the bridge and then 59 a piece so not not a terrible product price point for adding on a security light outside uh It's got a motion detector in it, 800 lumen light. And what's really nice is with the bridge, you have to have this little ring bridge thing. So it's worth grabbing one of those. Those are $49.

So get the package. It's cheaper to do it that way if you just need one or two. You only need one bridge for your house, though, as I've come to find out. These things, you basically take two screws, you mount it up on, like, the eave. It's waterproof. It just needs sunlight.

It's got a rechargeable battery inside. It's completely water-resistant and everything. So you can just, I just screwed them right to the eave of the house. And if someone walks by, it'll kick on. But since it's in the ring ecosystem, you can also integrate it in there and say, well, kick walks by, it'll kick on, but since it's in the ring ecosystem, you can also integrate it in there and say, well, kick that on, but also kick the light on for this light over here. And you can kind of group things together to like light up the whole house.

If you wanted to, um, really cool product, really good price point and really actually works well. I was kind of surprised the, little bridge is, it uses Bluetooth to set up, gets on your Wi-Fi, but to talk to these guys, it uses like a 900 megahertz thing, I found out. I had to go to the FCC's website because Ring doesn't say anything about it, but it's just like this 900 megahertz thing. And I have one, the bridge is actually laying on the floor in the garage here and clear across the house, which isn't very far, admittedly, but like the exact opposite corner of the house through brick wall, through my equipment rack, through the kitchen is the other one that I put up and it's got good signal.

No problem. So range is not an issue when you get down to 900 megahertz. Couldn't couldn't recommend these more. They're actually fun to kind of play with and set up and and get going. And they make a small one, too. There's a little small one. I don't have any experience with that one. These these are bright and you can actually control the brightness on them.

So if they're too bright, you can you can kind of turn them down. And yeah, it's got got a lot of smart things for for a fifty nine dollar outdoor light. Not bad. Can recommend at least that'll bundle in with your, uh, your outdoor rated at a 19 bulb you've been looking for. Yeah. Well that's, that's where my, that's where my, my parents, my dad. Uh, so some weird architectural fact about the houses where I grew up was, uh, that they would put these instead of putting like outdoor lights in, they would put like one light bulb on the corner of the house. Uh, and, and so you'll see

homes in the areas, like they'll have one light bulb on each corner of the house. And it just, it looks weird, but that's, but you drive down the street and like every house has it. So it must've been something like somebody did way back at the turn of the century, you know, 1900s. And, uh, every, everybody was like, Oh, I've got to have that because Bill over there did it on his house. So, you know, it must be the cool thing to do. I need an A19 outdoor light to fit under the eaves there where they have these little lights and I really would like it to be RGBW.

So like he can change the colors. Right now they're celebrating Mardi Gras. So happy Mardi Gras everybody. But he wants to change it, you know, like purple, green and gold. And I uh, I didn't really have a good, you know, answer for him there other than like the floodlights, right? So floodlights are pretty easy to get. You can plug those in and set them up in the different colors and they can shine up on the, on the walls of the exterior of the house. Those are all out outdoor rated, um, and, and, and would do the job. But

I was hoping to find something he could do more permanent, you know, with what he has. I'm not sure if there's an A19 out there that is like 66 rated or 67 rated. I don't know. If anybody knows something, let me know. If you have any feedback, questions, comments, pics of the weeks or A19 bulbs, let me know about. Give us a shout. Email address is feedback at hometech.fm or hometech.fm slash feedback. And you can fill out the online form there.

Well, that wraps up another week, guys. Thanks. Thanks for, for joining us here. So we're recording a little bit late tonight. Gavin had some, some, some, some work meetings that lasted a little bit longer than he thought. So we're all kind of getting, getting the end of the wick here. Yeah.

It's been a long week, but I'm just glad I can make time to sit here and record this. Yeah, absolutely. It's, it's been a long week and it's only Wednesday. I haven't obscene Winnie the Pooh comic to send you, you guys in our private channel here, but I'm not going to link to it on the show notes either. But it kind of goes along with how I feel about today.

So anyway, with that said, we want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our Patreon page. If you don't know about our Patreon page, head on over to hometech.fm support to learn how you can support Hometech for as little as $1 a month. Any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout out on the show, but every pledge gets you an invite to our private Slack chat, the hub, where you can join in printer talk every week and all the other aspects of home technology that we talk about in there. And even like the live streaming services that we talked about before, DreamStage.

Like, I'm glad we found that right there in the hub. If you want to help out, but can't support financially, totally understand. But we appreciate just a quick five-star rating or review, a positive review in the podcast app of your choice as you're listening there with your podcast on AirPlay over your sound speakers. It'd be great.

Well, that wraps up another week of Home Tech from everyone here. Have a great weekend and we will see you next week. Take care, everyone. Take care.