EDIT: but unlike Pine, ThirdReality one comes with quad-core ARM A53 CPU; 256MB RAM; 512MB flash; and can actually do audio processing. The price is about 1.5 times higher though
I'm half surprised they are still around as they seem to never restock most of their products, and half pleased they are still around and releasing products.
> as they seem to never restock most of their products
There is a product development strategy (I'm not sure if there's a formal name for it) where you're given a lead on a finite-but-large supply of parts you can acquire for absurdly cheap; so you buy the batch; develop and price a product around the part; market your product until you run out of the part; and then, rather than switching over to paying retail for the parts and pricing up your product, you just put your product on indefinite restock hiatus (only ever to be fulfilled if you happen to get another lead on a cheap supply of that same part.)
Usually, though, you get a lead on a cheap supply of a different part; and so the cycle begins again.
> There is a product development strategy (I'm not sure if there's a formal name for it) where you're given a lead on a finite-but-large supply of parts you can acquire for absurdly cheap; so you buy the batch;
This is how Aldi and Lidl fueled their growth. Instead of focusing on thousands of different product offerings, they looked at a narrower selection of products (~20 times smaller than their higher end competition) they can buy in very high volumes at substantial discounts. Their offering is defined by what is available for them at the time to buy under those conditions. Instead of ensuring a specific product is always available on the shelves, they might just stock a different product at specific times.
This is less obvious when 90% of their sales are under their private label but the supply behind it is whatever they can negotiate for a better deal.
Their "middle aisle" is the perfect example of this, it really just stocks a mix of whatever is the cheap product of the week and may no longer be available next week at the same price so they stock something else.
I've spent countless hours searching for a small, good quality passive speaker. In a roughly 4 inch cube size. That comes with an good (acoustically) box/enclosure. Plenty exist in various forms (kits) but I never know if they sound as good as even laptop or phone speakers. Which is a low bar, but still can't find good reviews.
A 4-inch cube doesn't leave much room for a passive speaker to be very good (depending on one's definition of "good").
We've got hard physical constraints with loudspeaker systems, and they show up as tradeoffs.
Very broadly speaking, in practical terms, this takes the form of a tradeoff betwixt enclosure volume, efficiency, and low-end frequency extension. It's impossible to improve all three of these at once. This was formalized with Thiele and Small's work ~60 years ago.
We get by with amazingly good small, self-amplified, active speakers these days because -- as a system -- they don't have the same constraints.
At their root, they're still just passive speakers... but whole of an active system comprises more than that. We can use EQ to improve low-end extension. We can use bigger amplifiers to make up for lack of efficiency.
We can use combinations of dynamic EQ and bigger amps to make small systems sound pretty darned good even at low volume and hold together nicely at higher volumes, thanks in part of some of the work of Fletcher and Munson nearly a century ago and also to modern measurement systems and the inexpensiveness of implementing functions (with DSP in 2026) that would have been unthinkably complex in the consumer analog space at any point on the timeline.
But while active speakers can be pretty neat, small passive speakers suck. They have always sucked in some way. They must always suck in some way compared to their larger peers, and a cube shape always makes some aspects of the suck even worse. Them's the breaks.
---
Anyway, the market wants small, active speakers these days...so we get small, active speakers. Reviewers are people too, and they review what people want to buy.
If I may ask: What's driving your desire for a small speaker that is also passive?
My intuition is that a small radio from the 80s is sufficient. Has relatively small size and passive speaker. Small passive speaker and small enclosure are cheap aka not 100+ USD. A tonie box sounds fine. Can I diy reproduce one similar at low cost (less than buying 50 USD)?
A lot of words explaining how something is hard to do because physics but in my layman experience any speaker I heard that didnt cost $500+ sounded horrible regardless of size, while my M1 Macbook Air sounds better than all of those, while keeping tiny formfactor.
Clearly it can be done, its just noone seem to be investing in RnD enough.
It can be done on a Macbook because a Macbook is not a passive speaker.
A Macbook comprises an entire audio system, with amplification and DSP and everything else that a passive speaker -- by its very nature -- can never provide.
I explained this once. If you read through it, and take the time to understand it, and then think that you can explain it with superior brevity, then by all means: Feel free. :)
If you have questions, then: Please ask them.
If you think you can also defy what are commonly accepted to be real physical constraints and produce a tiny passive practical speaker that sounds great, then: By all means, do that as well! The proceeds of this kind of success can make you very wealthy -- maybe not Mars-mission wealthy, but probably at least beach house, private flights, and built-to-spec Porsche 911 GT3-level wealthy. You'll then be able to take time to decide what your next venture is, or perhaps decide to just live with that level of lavishness doing whatever makes you happy until your days run out.
I’ll wait for the reviews. I bought the Home Assistant Voice Preview device and it was underwhelming. Bad speaker, bad mic, bad pickup. I really wanted to like it but my Echo blew it out of the water.
I’m deep into the HA system so I cannot wait for Echo-quality that I can attach to my HA.
I have, but like you mention, it’s only something that can be done on older shows that can be re-flashed. It’s something I’m considering but haven’t pulled the trigger on yet.
I really wish someone would come out with a $25 "box" that sits on top of my bookshelf speaker that allows me to Airplay to it and power said speaker with a ~50w class-D amp. Then if I have multiple ones, it would allow them to pair and setup stereo or surround sound. I might even pay $50 for it. Kinda like a Sonos Amp but not at that price point.
Everything Sonos is already expensive. It's got the lifestyle-product tax built in.
Anything involving Sonos with wires increases support cost. Simply involving wires produces new ways for people to screw things up (as if supporting their wireless-only customers wasn't expensive enough).
And those who are using wires but not screwing things up gain the ability to expand and improve their audio systems in their own ways, without paying the Sonos tax to do so. They can buy/upgrade whatever speakers they want from any manufacturer in the world, while keeping the same Sonos Amp. That represents lost opportunity, so the amp gets taxed harder.
(The tech inside the Sonos Amp isn't particularly novel. It's just a small Linux box with a trick proprietary software stack and some audio hardware.)
I do like my Sonos setup (have a pair of Era300s, an Arc Ultra, Sub4, and Sub Mini) and now that they've fixed the app issues, it works really well. And the sound quality is good enough for me. I just wish the Amp product was about half the price. It doesn't do all that much more.
Same. Well, I did buy the PinePhone Braveheart edition a few years ago, but never did much with it. I keep an eye on the PinePhone Pro and PineNote in particular, these could be fantastic but it seems the software ecosystem is quite slow to develop.
What I like about Pine64 is that they go for low price points. Most of their products seems to be priced in line with low- or mid-end proprietary alternatives. Yes you can still complain about the hardware you get for what you pay but IMO for this kind of stuff, it's better to have an accessible price point and limited hardware than to charge a premium price for mid-range hardware that is still limited by experimental software support.
> What I like about Pine64 is that they go for low price points.
Sometimes I wish they would charge a little more and use that extra $$$ to pay someone to make the things work. there are too many rough edges that a full time developer would just fix, but nobody in the community gets "a round touit". These are things I could fix, but after my day job and getting my kids to everything I don't have energy left to focus.
As an embedded engineer, I tend to agree. Their hardware looks good, but I am not going to spend my free time getting their software to work as well as I know it could if they hired someone like me.
Huh, maybe I should contact them, since I am freelancing now….
I have their Pinecil and PinePower Desktop. They're really great products, I use the PinePower daily to charge my stuff at my desk and the Pinecil made soldering a joy, now I no longer dread it and can enjoy tinkering with hobby electronics again.
I've got two Pinceils (because reasons) and a PinePower Desktop. They are, indeed, great.
Everyone I know who is vaguely-serious about soldering has their own favorite brand/method/voodoo, so they're not interested in the soldering irons even if we do a direct comparison and the Pinecil performs better. (There's no accounting for taste, I guess.)
But the PinePower box is different. I've helped them sell a few of those to various geeky friends. They do what they're supposed to do, handle all of the various fast-charging standards that small portable widgets tend to use, and they do it in a usefully-informative way.
So it's wonderful for charging stuff and can easily earn a permanent place in a household, and a person can very clearly see if a given charging cable is being difficult for whatever reason that it is without goofing around with extra parts like USB power analyzers.
I hope they stick around. They seem to be one of the good ones.
> With just 32 MiB of embedded pSRAM memory and 16 MiB of flash, and 128 KiB ROM storage, the specs may sound meagre – although in the current AI climate, generous – but this is an embedded device not a full-blown PC hiding in an aroma diffuser1.
It somewhat reminds me of the PineCube, which had 128MB DDR3. Once the Linux tax was paid it was basically unusable.
> Factory shipped firmware is open-source and provides Wyoming Satellite, compatible with assistence platforms such as Home Assistant.
They are at least supposed to be able to show it working with some factory software [1]. I would have just liked to have seen some edge compute capability.
Great price for such a device! Once I had an idea to fix something like this using raspberry pi zero and Jabra USB conference speaker. I had almost the same use case for it. To use it with openclaw and openrouter models connected with my full raspberry pi running home automation
If only; you can definitely get "audiophile network switches" which provide a cleaner sound when you pull your music from Roon over them, or something.
That is false for reasons that have nothing to do with analog vs digital.
Analog doesn't allow all the tricks the loudness wars required to win, so often analog really was better than digital. That is garbage in garbage out, and analog got less garbage on the input side. When someone who cares about good music in a perfect listening environment mixes and masters everything to the best of the technology, then digital is better. (but note that perfect listening environment is rare in the real world so good experts are compromising anyway to try to correct for the bad environment people listen in, this can be done well or bad)
I feel like mastering shouldn't be a factor in this, because yeah some CDs where obviously terribly done to sound louder but that isn't a quality of the format itself
CDs improved over LPs in dynamic range, frequency response, error correction, replayability, stereo separation, and noise floor. They also, at scale, became much cheaper to manufacture and distribute.
But if the engineers, producers and marketers insist on not using the technical capabilities, or deliberately degrading them to chase perceived loudness, there's nothing the purchaser can do except complain.
This is just a satellite device for Home Assistant (self-hosted) which you can set up to do processing however you’d like. There are cloud options for each stage of the pipeline (speech to text, LLM to turn text into tool calls, text to speech), but there are local options for all of that: https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/voice_remote_loc...
i wish for and fantasize about building something like this every time my alexa starts following up with an ad for a feature i will never want or use. glad to see this exists!
> PineVoice is in an early-stage development and early adopters will encounter quirks and performance issues. Future firmware updates should resolve issues in time, but like all of Pine64’s products, you’re not buying a consumer-grade product.
Like the Penny Arcade comic about a director who’s making a movie that’s not meant for the critics. “Wait, you can do that?”
Does this device allow raw access to the microphone array? Considering the SoC I might want to stream it elsewhere for processing. How many independent channels does the array provide?
I’m having déjà vu… ThirdReality had released “Voice and Music Assistant Dev Edition,” which looks exactly like Pine Voice Smart Speaker.
https://www.thirdreality.com/products/voice-music-assistant-...
EDIT: but unlike Pine, ThirdReality one comes with quad-core ARM A53 CPU; 256MB RAM; 512MB flash; and can actually do audio processing. The price is about 1.5 times higher though
I'm half surprised they are still around as they seem to never restock most of their products, and half pleased they are still around and releasing products.
> as they seem to never restock most of their products
There is a product development strategy (I'm not sure if there's a formal name for it) where you're given a lead on a finite-but-large supply of parts you can acquire for absurdly cheap; so you buy the batch; develop and price a product around the part; market your product until you run out of the part; and then, rather than switching over to paying retail for the parts and pricing up your product, you just put your product on indefinite restock hiatus (only ever to be fulfilled if you happen to get another lead on a cheap supply of that same part.)
Usually, though, you get a lead on a cheap supply of a different part; and so the cycle begins again.
> There is a product development strategy (I'm not sure if there's a formal name for it) where you're given a lead on a finite-but-large supply of parts you can acquire for absurdly cheap; so you buy the batch;
This is how Aldi and Lidl fueled their growth. Instead of focusing on thousands of different product offerings, they looked at a narrower selection of products (~20 times smaller than their higher end competition) they can buy in very high volumes at substantial discounts. Their offering is defined by what is available for them at the time to buy under those conditions. Instead of ensuring a specific product is always available on the shelves, they might just stock a different product at specific times.
This is less obvious when 90% of their sales are under their private label but the supply behind it is whatever they can negotiate for a better deal.
Their "middle aisle" is the perfect example of this, it really just stocks a mix of whatever is the cheap product of the week and may no longer be available next week at the same price so they stock something else.
Apple can manage this, but Pine relies on open-source software that moves pretty slowly.
> only ever to be fulfilled if you happen to get another lead on a cheap supply of that same part
I've also heard that's how McDonalds does McRib sandwiches—they only offer it when pork futures are cheap enough.
I've spent countless hours searching for a small, good quality passive speaker. In a roughly 4 inch cube size. That comes with an good (acoustically) box/enclosure. Plenty exist in various forms (kits) but I never know if they sound as good as even laptop or phone speakers. Which is a low bar, but still can't find good reviews.
A 4-inch cube doesn't leave much room for a passive speaker to be very good (depending on one's definition of "good").
We've got hard physical constraints with loudspeaker systems, and they show up as tradeoffs.
Very broadly speaking, in practical terms, this takes the form of a tradeoff betwixt enclosure volume, efficiency, and low-end frequency extension. It's impossible to improve all three of these at once. This was formalized with Thiele and Small's work ~60 years ago.
We get by with amazingly good small, self-amplified, active speakers these days because -- as a system -- they don't have the same constraints.
At their root, they're still just passive speakers... but whole of an active system comprises more than that. We can use EQ to improve low-end extension. We can use bigger amplifiers to make up for lack of efficiency.
We can use combinations of dynamic EQ and bigger amps to make small systems sound pretty darned good even at low volume and hold together nicely at higher volumes, thanks in part of some of the work of Fletcher and Munson nearly a century ago and also to modern measurement systems and the inexpensiveness of implementing functions (with DSP in 2026) that would have been unthinkably complex in the consumer analog space at any point on the timeline.
But while active speakers can be pretty neat, small passive speakers suck. They have always sucked in some way. They must always suck in some way compared to their larger peers, and a cube shape always makes some aspects of the suck even worse. Them's the breaks.
---
Anyway, the market wants small, active speakers these days...so we get small, active speakers. Reviewers are people too, and they review what people want to buy.
If I may ask: What's driving your desire for a small speaker that is also passive?
My intuition is that a small radio from the 80s is sufficient. Has relatively small size and passive speaker. Small passive speaker and small enclosure are cheap aka not 100+ USD. A tonie box sounds fine. Can I diy reproduce one similar at low cost (less than buying 50 USD)?
A lot of words explaining how something is hard to do because physics but in my layman experience any speaker I heard that didnt cost $500+ sounded horrible regardless of size, while my M1 Macbook Air sounds better than all of those, while keeping tiny formfactor.
Clearly it can be done, its just noone seem to be investing in RnD enough.
It can be done on a Macbook because a Macbook is not a passive speaker.
A Macbook comprises an entire audio system, with amplification and DSP and everything else that a passive speaker -- by its very nature -- can never provide.
I explained this once. If you read through it, and take the time to understand it, and then think that you can explain it with superior brevity, then by all means: Feel free. :)
If you have questions, then: Please ask them.
If you think you can also defy what are commonly accepted to be real physical constraints and produce a tiny passive practical speaker that sounds great, then: By all means, do that as well! The proceeds of this kind of success can make you very wealthy -- maybe not Mars-mission wealthy, but probably at least beach house, private flights, and built-to-spec Porsche 911 GT3-level wealthy. You'll then be able to take time to decide what your next venture is, or perhaps decide to just live with that level of lavishness doing whatever makes you happy until your days run out.
People with fresh ears are born every day.
Second hand Jabra Speak 410. It's the best because dumb and USB. Dumb makes it silent (no voiceover messages like "volume up" or "connection closed")
I’ll wait for the reviews. I bought the Home Assistant Voice Preview device and it was underwhelming. Bad speaker, bad mic, bad pickup. I really wanted to like it but my Echo blew it out of the water.
I’m deep into the HA system so I cannot wait for Echo-quality that I can attach to my HA.
Have you looked into third party firmware for your Echo? I just bought some used Echo Shows that others have figured out how to install LineageOS on.
I have, but like you mention, it’s only something that can be done on older shows that can be re-flashed. It’s something I’m considering but haven’t pulled the trigger on yet.
same i cant see how the voice preview is even usable
I really wish someone would come out with a $25 "box" that sits on top of my bookshelf speaker that allows me to Airplay to it and power said speaker with a ~50w class-D amp. Then if I have multiple ones, it would allow them to pair and setup stereo or surround sound. I might even pay $50 for it. Kinda like a Sonos Amp but not at that price point.
Does https://sonocotta.com/louder-esp32/ look like something you might be looking for?
Whoa, yeah that does look very promising!!! Thanks!
I'm thinking about getting an Audiocast M5[0]. It seems to do exactly that. The price seems to be around US$ 30.
[0] - https://audiocast.io/
Doesn't look like the Amp50 is available to buy...
That's missing the 'amp' part.
You're 75% correct, one of the 4 products does have an amp though.
WiiM makes a few. With or without amp. It can be had for about ~40 refurbished from what I suspect to be their eBay store.
Airplay 2. I have it hooked via optical to a soundbar.
Whats the justification for Sonos Amp being 31 times the price you're willing to spend? Niche problem or is the tech inside it worth that?
Everything Sonos is already expensive. It's got the lifestyle-product tax built in.
Anything involving Sonos with wires increases support cost. Simply involving wires produces new ways for people to screw things up (as if supporting their wireless-only customers wasn't expensive enough).
And those who are using wires but not screwing things up gain the ability to expand and improve their audio systems in their own ways, without paying the Sonos tax to do so. They can buy/upgrade whatever speakers they want from any manufacturer in the world, while keeping the same Sonos Amp. That represents lost opportunity, so the amp gets taxed harder.
(The tech inside the Sonos Amp isn't particularly novel. It's just a small Linux box with a trick proprietary software stack and some audio hardware.)
I do like my Sonos setup (have a pair of Era300s, an Arc Ultra, Sub4, and Sub Mini) and now that they've fixed the app issues, it works really well. And the sound quality is good enough for me. I just wish the Amp product was about half the price. It doesn't do all that much more.
Squeezelite-ESP32 is a solution that is sort of aligned with this scenario. No airplay and you would need an amp module to get to 50w.
After reading this comment I also wanted the same thing and found this https://www.up2stream.net/products/up2stream-mini-receiver-b...
I went with iPod Hi-Fi + AirPort Express connected via mini toslink to mini toslink cable.
Would love for Pine64 to thrive.
I don't own any of their products, but I am glad they exist.
Same. Well, I did buy the PinePhone Braveheart edition a few years ago, but never did much with it. I keep an eye on the PinePhone Pro and PineNote in particular, these could be fantastic but it seems the software ecosystem is quite slow to develop.
What I like about Pine64 is that they go for low price points. Most of their products seems to be priced in line with low- or mid-end proprietary alternatives. Yes you can still complain about the hardware you get for what you pay but IMO for this kind of stuff, it's better to have an accessible price point and limited hardware than to charge a premium price for mid-range hardware that is still limited by experimental software support.
> What I like about Pine64 is that they go for low price points.
Sometimes I wish they would charge a little more and use that extra $$$ to pay someone to make the things work. there are too many rough edges that a full time developer would just fix, but nobody in the community gets "a round touit". These are things I could fix, but after my day job and getting my kids to everything I don't have energy left to focus.
As an embedded engineer, I tend to agree. Their hardware looks good, but I am not going to spend my free time getting their software to work as well as I know it could if they hired someone like me.
Huh, maybe I should contact them, since I am freelancing now….
It sounds to me like you and people like gp could both be served by a bounty mechanism that doesn't have to include Pine64.
I have their Pinecil and PinePower Desktop. They're really great products, I use the PinePower daily to charge my stuff at my desk and the Pinecil made soldering a joy, now I no longer dread it and can enjoy tinkering with hobby electronics again.
I've got two Pinceils (because reasons) and a PinePower Desktop. They are, indeed, great.
Everyone I know who is vaguely-serious about soldering has their own favorite brand/method/voodoo, so they're not interested in the soldering irons even if we do a direct comparison and the Pinecil performs better. (There's no accounting for taste, I guess.)
But the PinePower box is different. I've helped them sell a few of those to various geeky friends. They do what they're supposed to do, handle all of the various fast-charging standards that small portable widgets tend to use, and they do it in a usefully-informative way.
So it's wonderful for charging stuff and can easily earn a permanent place in a household, and a person can very clearly see if a given charging cable is being difficult for whatever reason that it is without goofing around with extra parts like USB power analyzers.
I hope they stick around. They seem to be one of the good ones.
> With just 32 MiB of embedded pSRAM memory and 16 MiB of flash, and 128 KiB ROM storage, the specs may sound meagre – although in the current AI climate, generous – but this is an embedded device not a full-blown PC hiding in an aroma diffuser1.
It somewhat reminds me of the PineCube, which had 128MB DDR3. Once the Linux tax was paid it was basically unusable.
> Factory shipped firmware is open-source and provides Wyoming Satellite, compatible with assistence platforms such as Home Assistant.
They are at least supposed to be able to show it working with some factory software [1]. I would have just liked to have seen some edge compute capability.
[1] https://pine64.org/documentation/PineVoice/
Great price for such a device! Once I had an idea to fix something like this using raspberry pi zero and Jabra USB conference speaker. I had almost the same use case for it. To use it with openclaw and openrouter models connected with my full raspberry pi running home automation
i just wonder how good it sounds. open audiophile grade hardware is something of a gap.
Nah. A true audiophile would be analog only - no room for anything digital, smart or connected. “Wifi EM interferes with the sound”
If only; you can definitely get "audiophile network switches" which provide a cleaner sound when you pull your music from Roon over them, or something.
Audiophiles are the easiest marks on earth, man.
No, I don't know any audiophiles who think analog is superior. Digital is objectively better sounding
Maybe not anymore, but that used to be a thing. I suspect some are still left, but I stay away from the places where audiophiles hang out.
It’s still a thing, but it is no longer based in objective reality.
I can understand thinking analog sounds nicer or more nostalgic, but it is strictly worse than digital
That is false for reasons that have nothing to do with analog vs digital.
Analog doesn't allow all the tricks the loudness wars required to win, so often analog really was better than digital. That is garbage in garbage out, and analog got less garbage on the input side. When someone who cares about good music in a perfect listening environment mixes and masters everything to the best of the technology, then digital is better. (but note that perfect listening environment is rare in the real world so good experts are compromising anyway to try to correct for the bad environment people listen in, this can be done well or bad)
I feel like mastering shouldn't be a factor in this, because yeah some CDs where obviously terribly done to sound louder but that isn't a quality of the format itself
What matters is the final result not the parts.
It's capitalism making things worse again.
CDs improved over LPs in dynamic range, frequency response, error correction, replayability, stereo separation, and noise floor. They also, at scale, became much cheaper to manufacture and distribute.
But if the engineers, producers and marketers insist on not using the technical capabilities, or deliberately degrading them to chase perceived loudness, there's nothing the purchaser can do except complain.
It’s an off the shelf SOM.
Audiophiles are safe from this device.
As someone who was burned by Mycroft going bankrupt: I want to believe
Would be curious if this could be made to support sendspin (and is this technology the best for an open "homegroup" like audio experience)?
It’s funny that it comes with a 30 day warranty.
I love that this is out and one day hope to replace my alexas and whatnot so I can turn on my lights without hearing an ad for amazon prime.
Does this use _local_ processing of voice commands?
This is just a satellite device for Home Assistant (self-hosted) which you can set up to do processing however you’d like. There are cloud options for each stage of the pipeline (speech to text, LLM to turn text into tool calls, text to speech), but there are local options for all of that: https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/voice_remote_loc...
My reading of the documentation [1] is that everything is local.
[1] https://pine64.org/documentation/PineVoice/Software/
i wish for and fantasize about building something like this every time my alexa starts following up with an ad for a feature i will never want or use. glad to see this exists!
Dont mind if i do
> PineVoice is in an early-stage development and early adopters will encounter quirks and performance issues. Future firmware updates should resolve issues in time, but like all of Pine64’s products, you’re not buying a consumer-grade product.
Like the Penny Arcade comic about a director who’s making a movie that’s not meant for the critics. “Wait, you can do that?”
This one: <https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/24/the-adventures...>
Does this device allow raw access to the microphone array? Considering the SoC I might want to stream it elsewhere for processing. How many independent channels does the array provide?
From the sources it is based on BL606P
https://en.bouffalolab.com/product/?type=detail&id=16
voice processing is in hardware unfortunately, but it exposes some things like DOA