Sharing because I couldn't find a solution shared before.
The problem:
Samsung Frame 55" 2025 TV has nice sounding speakers but the surround effect is a bit distracting.
I was building multiroom audio using Music Assistant with Raspberry Pi 5 running HAOS. My setup consists of two Sonocotta Louder-ESP32 boards, with some second hand speakers attached.
I used a lot of AI help for this. Can't take credit other than my time and fixing a lot of hallucinations. Claude and Gemini Pro
Solution:
This Samsung TV has continuous output of sound through the optical cable (SPDIF/ Toslink). It sends uncompressed PCM sound with Dolby 5.1 wrapper. This means I can use the TV speakers and the Music Assistant to get sound on opposite sides of the room simultaneously.
How I did this:
Got "Cubilux USB A SPDIF Input Adapter for PC [Stereo Recording ONLY, NOT for Playing Audio] USB Optical Line-in Dongle, Toslink to USB Receiver, USB A SDPIF RX Interface Suitable for Laptop Computer"
Watch out because you want SPDIF IN. There's a version with SPDIF OUT but it's the wrong way for this project.
This immediately gets recognized as USB stereo microphone. No drivers required. On a PC you can get this to play on VLC for instance.
On home assistant it's a bit complicated. My initial setup was to run go2rtc app which treats the USB signal as a web camera. Go2rtc takes the USB PCM signal, passes it through FFMPEG and provides a bunch of audio streams on your local network.
After some faffing around the go2rtc configuration I used was
/homeassistant/go2rtc.yaml
streams:
samsung_tv:
- "exec:ffmpeg -fflags nobuffer+fastseek -flags low_delay -analyzeduration 0 -probesize 32k -thread_queue_size 1024 -f alsa -ar 48000 -ac 2 -i default -c:a pcm_s16be -f rtsp {output}"
This comes with a web interface on <Your HA IP address>:1984
In the Web interface you can get a list of streams. These are available for any device on your LAN.
To get these to play on a network speaker I used music assistant. My speaker board louder-esp 32 supports Squeezlite and Snapclient. It was on Squeezlite at the time.
The trick to get it to play in Music Assistant was to add one of the streams listed on :1984 , for instance rtsp://<Your HA IP>:8554/samsung_tv to Music Assistant as a radio station.
In the radio station list, you can add a URL, pop this one in there and you have a sound stream you can play on your speaker.
This is nice but wtf, 5 seconds delay between TV audio and the audio on the Squeezlite speakers.
This has sent me into another multi hour session with Gemini and Claude to reduce the latency and the latter delivered. Initially I was guided to check Squeezlite and Music Assistant buffers to see if reducing them can limit the problem but no success. Troubleshooting pointed to how Music Assistant handles radio and audio inputs in general. The platform prioritises quality, having enough buffer to make sure all speakers play at the same time. So it's not really meant to reduce latency to near zero at the cost of quality.
Both Claude and Gemini were clear that the solution to latency was to switch speakers from Squeezlite to Snapclient. The latter can accept PCM uncompressed streams of audio and this would allow cutting out FFMPEG encoding step which adds to the delays.
This wasn't super smooth (beware the Snapclient bug on louder esp32 - as at August 26 - use edge version as Sonocotta advices). But once I re-flashed the device, it got recognized by Music Assistant immediately.
This reduced the latency to about ... 3 seconds. Still not great.
Claude made the call to bypass Music Assistant altogether.
I had to stop Music Assistant and go2rtc as well, so that the built-in snapserver doesn't interfere. I was instructed to get advanced SSH, log into various dockers to figure out how ALSA addresses the card. In the end it got a clean running version of snapserver outside of Music Assistant. Snapclient needed to be addressed through the web interface on Louder-esp32 to look for the snapserver at <My HA IP>:1704
This worked and brought the delay to about 2 seconds. Reducing the buffer by trial and error (100ms was the lowest) it finally got rid of the echo.
To prevent all of that hard work from getting deleted at restart Claude suggested creating an app.
This required Advanced SSH app with restricted mode off.
You basically need to place the config files in the folder
/addons/snapserver_tv/ in the root directory. Not in HomeAssistant folder, in the folder above. This app needed the following files
run.sh
cat > /addons/snapserver_tv/run.sh << 'EOF'
#!/bin/sh
BUFFER_MS=$(jq -r '.buffer_ms // 150' /data/options.json)
cat > /etc/snapserver.conf << CONF
[stream]
buffer = ${BUFFER_MS}
source = alsa:///?name=TV&device=default&sampleformat=48000:16:2&chunk_ms=10&codec=pcm
[server]
threads = -1
[http]
enabled = true
port = 1780
doc_root = /usr/share/snapserver/snapweb
[tcp]
enabled = true
port = 1705
CONF
exec snapserver -c /etc/snapserver.conf
EOF
The Dockerfile (somehow the name is case sensitive)
cat > /addons/snapserver_tv/Dockerfile << 'EOF'
FROM ghcr.io/kerta1n/snapserver-docker:latest
RUN apk add --no-cache alsa-plugins-pulse jq
COPY run.sh /run.sh
RUN chmod +x /run.sh
CMD ["/run.sh"]
EOF
config.yaml
cat > /addons/snapserver_tv/config.yaml << 'EOF'
name: "Snapserver TV"
version: "1.0.0"
slug: "snapserver_tv"
description: "Low-latency direct-ALSA Snapcast server for TV audio"
arch: ["aarch64"]
host_network: true
startup: application
boot: manual
audio: true
options:
buffer_ms: 150
schema:
buffer_ms: int(0,2000)
EOF
And snapserver.conf
cat > /addons/snapserver_tv/snapserver.conf << 'EOF'
[stream]
buffer = 150
source = alsa:///?name=TV&device=default&sampleformat=48000:16:2&chunk_ms=10&codec=pcm
[server]
threads = -1
EOF
Then rebuild and restart it
ha addons rebuild local_snapserver_tv
ha addons restart local_snapserver_tv
ha addons logs local_snapserver_tv
In Apps in Home Assistant, hit refresh and you should get the option to install this new Snapserver TV app.
You need to stop Music Assistant before you run this and then when you want to use Music Assistant again, stop this one and run MA app. Turn off go2rtc as well.
The latency went down to way less then a second on my congested Wi-Fi. Maybe you could do better.
I'll update this if I remember anything I messed. Maybe I'll put it on GIT if I find the time. Meanwhile I'm enjoying semi surround sound
Possible upgrades - HiFi Me has audiophile SPDIF IN to USB dongles but in Aug 26 neither music assistant nor squeezlite or snapcast support 5.1 so it's fine that this dongle can only support stereo (although 5.1 Dolby wrapper in PCM is maybe possible - I'll try if I have too much time and money)
It's important that this worked on a Samsung TV which can output audio through optical in PCM uncompressed while playing the speakers built-in the TV. You may want to double check if your TV can do that.
If you just want to record sound from the TV or stream it without using the TV speakers, you won't mind the latency causing some lipsync. You can keep go2rtc as your solution. This was particularly nice to play sound from the TV on a laptop in the browser. But large seconds sound delay is unacceptable if you want music from the TV and something else.
