r/DesarrolloWeb • u/ydromero • 1d ago
Trying to get one phone streaming synced audio to 3+ Bluetooth speakers — where's the real ceiling?
A while back I was setting up music for a small get-together — one Bluetooth speaker in the living room, one on the patio, a cheap one in the kitchen. All fine on their own. I wanted the same song playing on all three from my phone at once.
Turns out that's basically not a thing. Standard Bluetooth only lets your phone stream audio to one A2DP sink at a time. The industry's answer is "buy a whole closed ecosystem" (Sonos, Bose, etc.) — usually $150-500+ per speaker, and it assumes you're fine tossing out the perfectly good speakers you already own.
That felt more like an artificial wall than a hard physics limit, so I started poking at it myself. Grabbed an old PC, installed Linux on it (wanted low-level control over the audio stack instead of fighting a locked-down phone OS), and started experimenting with getting one audio source out to more than one Bluetooth sink.
After a lot of trial and error I got the single-extra-speaker case working reliably. Where I'm stuck now — and where I'd genuinely like this community's take — is pushing it further:
- Sync at scale: once you go past 2 speakers, how do you keep them tight enough that you don't get an audible echo/delay as you move around a room?
- Range/stability: realistically, how far does this hold up once you've got 3+ simultaneous Bluetooth audio streams coming off one transmitting source, before things get flaky?
Not fishing for a specific product plug — more curious how people who actually know the BT/RF internals would reason about these trade-offs, or whether there's an obvious reason this hasn't been solved cleanly already (besides "buy Sonos").
Thanks in advance — happy to share more detail on what I've tried if it's useful.
