I have a pair of HomePod Minis in my home office room. Yesterday I bought an additional pair and put one each in the bedroom and living room. Initially I was going to pair them in the living room, but I realized one alone is fine as I don’t spend too much time there and what I wanted really was music playing in all rooms. So now I have the paired Minis in the office room and one each in the living room and bedroom. And I get multi-room audio, yipee!
I can control these from the iPhone and/ or Apple Watch. Nice!
It is silly, but I am quite pleased with it. It’s not cheap, and thanks to things like PayPal Credit I can spread the cost of yesterday’s purchase over 3-4 months… but it’s worth it I think. I didn’t go with any colours for the new pair – they weren’t available, plus I’d have a tough time choosing colors; so I just went with blacks. The ones in the office room are white.
Update: Not entirely bliss. Today, some two weeks after I first posted I moved the Bedroom HomePod Mini back to the Living Room and made a Stereo Pair. I realized that with AirPlay 2 (which is what the HomePod Minis use for multi-room play) not all HomePod Minis stream Apple Music directly from the Internet. Only one of them does and it pushes to the rest. Which is fine in theory, except when the Bedroom one is the one doing the pushing… it is farthest from my Internet router and thus has the worst Wi-Fi range, so it causes stutters and such in the playback. Worse, this does not only happen during multi-room playback. Say I started something in the Bedroom and then moved it to the Living Room (closest to the router) – thus stopping music in the Bedroom. The music is no longer playing in the Bedroom but it is still the one pushing music to the Living Room. Now that’s crazy coz this way of doing things results in my Living Room one occassionally stuttering.
There’s no way for me to make the Living Room the “authoritative” one except stopping music everywher and starting it afresh on the Living Room by playing something new.
I also found moving music from one room to another is not always smooth. Many times Siri would just stop playing music in one room when I ask it to add the music to all rooms. Or it would play different songs in each room. Not very reliable basically.