Logitech Squeezebox

100%. I have the same experience - my home runs seven Logitech (formerly Slim Devices) “squeezebox” players from a home server with a ripped collection and options for Spotify. The networked players either have their own speaker, or are connected to amp/speakers. In practice almost all of our music plays through these devices. It’s great. The only time we connect multiple players to sync up is at larger parties, like once a year. It’s just one button press to do it, so not using this capability isn’t that it’s too complex, it just turns out not to be that useful to us. The main use case for multi zone audio is handled by the A/B/A+B speaker setting on one particular amp. As you say, YMMV.

I run a self hosted server of Squeezebox and have 10+ players around the house. The hardware is long discontinued, but can be bought second hand. I can stream Spotify and internet radio. Very happy with it. Connect the Squeezebox Touch via toslink to active speakers etc.

When I read stories about companies like Spotify creating e-waste like this, I think it’s worth pointing out that commercial companies don’t have to behave this way. As a counter-point, back around 2008, I purchased two Squeezebox music players from Logitech (digital music players that Logitech had acquired from Slim Devices: high quality DACs that supported every audio format, gap-less playback, synchronised playing on multiple devices, and were very configurable). They discontinued these products four years later (2012) but kept their mysqueezebox.com online service running up until the start of this year (2024). They kept the user forums running and archived the knowledge-base wiki. Most importantly, they open-sourced the stand-alone server software for running a local Squeezebox server and continued to pay the main developer to maintain the project for more than a decade after they discontinued the products. He’s still the lead developer and project maintainer of the server software, now called Lyrion Music Server: https://lyrion.org/ Correction : the stand-alone server software was always open source, specifically GPLv2. In addition to the audio quality and features, that was one of the selling points for me. It being written in Perl, meant that it was both cross-platform and easy to run on a GNU/Linux system.

Probably a good time to give a shout out to Mopidy: https://mopidy.com/ Though as for myself, I'm still running Squeezebox - nothing like being able to SSH into your smart speaker and mess around with the Perl system that's running it.

Currently I have multiple different Squeezebox players (Boom, Radio, Receiver, Touch), then on mobile Squeezeplay app (Android) for mobile usage (sometimes quite handy, when somewhere else than home, nice way to have own music library with me via VPN with same UI as home). Also Chrome speakers are players from LMS point of view. Squeezeboxes are rather durable, probably will use those for many more years. Have been also collecting little replacement player stock :) Wanted to evaluate esp32 -based player mainly for hacking purposes, but havent found yet time to work on those.