On Tuesday I wrote about how I was very much un-wowed by
Google’s recently announced latest addition to the Nexus line of devices, the
5X.

There was, however, something announced at last week’s
Google event that I was very excited about.

Meet the Chromecast audio.

Chromecast devices have been around for a little while now,
and they’re a USB-powered dongle that plugs into a spare HDMI port on your TV
and allows you to “cast” video from your phone to display it on the big screen.

The audio version follows a very similar concept. It’s also
powered by USB, but then it plugs into your existing stereo and allows you to “cast”
music to it from your phone.

You could argue that Bluetooth works just fine for doing
this – indeed we have a Bluetooth speaker in the kitchen for just this sort of
thing. Google tells us that a WiFi device can offer better sound quality than Bluetooth
is capable of and has some other benefits too, but I don’t care about any of
that.

What I’m excited about, is the possibility of whole home
audio. I built my
whole home audio system from a collection of raspberry pis because I
thought the existing offerings in the marketplace didn’t offer good value.
Apparently Google agree.

The Chromecast audio won’t have whole home audio
functionality at launch, but apparently it’s coming in a future software
update. I for one am very excited about this.

The benchmark system for whole home audio is quite clearly Sonos – that’s the system against which all
others are measured. They have a product called the Connect which allows you take
a set of speakers you already own and, for want of a better term, make them “smart.”

The Chromecast does much the same thing, but for the price
of one Sonos Connect you could buy ten of them.