Echo w/ whole house audio

[kid_drew]

I'm just getting started with the Echo, so apologies for being a newbie and if this question has been asked 100 times already.  We have 6-zone whole house audio, and I'm trying to figure out if it's possible to integrate an Echo with this so I can control it from every room.  I'm less worried about the technical details of interacting with my equipment - I'm more interested in figuring out how to bridge multiple Echos together to make a network.

Ideally, I would have Echos scattered all over the house (zones), and the network would be smart enough to know that a command to turn on Pandora needs to be passed to the Echo in my equipment closet.

Is this possible?  Wishful thinking?

[Premierduo]

Echo or Echo Dots running on the same wifi router can control any lights anywhere. The zones are set up via the phone app for eg Phillips Hue.
So say you want the kitchen lights on and you're in the bedroom, you can ask the bedroom dot to do this.

[DParker]

Echo or Echo Dots running on the same wifi router can control any lights anywhere.

Your Echos/Dots don't even need to be in the same network.  The integration with smart devices is tied to your Amazon Alexa account, not the network(s) your devices are in.

[kid_drew]

Ok, but to control the whole-house audio system, the network would have to know to send the command to the Dot located in my equipment closet.  I don't want audio coming out of the closest Dot, only the one in the closet.  Is that possible?

[kevb]

The dots won't work that way, but another thread stated you could possibly pair a remote with the dot that's in the closet. Or place a harmony hub in the closet, and use any echo/ dot to run your audio equipment.

[huntrm]

I started same thread on this topic back in April - see here:  http://www.echotalk.org/index.php/topic,496.0.html

I also have a whole-home audio (Russound) where luckily, I ran an RCA cable from the audio cabinet that stores the audio unit up to our bedroom.  From there, I connected the dot to the Russound and am able to execute commands but only from our bedroom.

There's no bridging option where one performs playback and the other relays a command to the one doing playback.  Others suggested a remote that you press a button and speak into it, but that defeats the purpose of voice-only. 

Let's hope bridging is something in the future.  If so, I'll easily pick up 2+ dots for our home.

[Kyle76]

I also have a Russound whole-house audio system with six different zones.  Although I have about 10k songs in my digital music collection that I can access through a phone app from anywhere in the house, I'm currently enjoying Amazon Music Unlimited on a new Dot in my office (free, single-Dot trial), so I'm thinking about expanding that capability to a Dot at home.  I'm interested in ways to make this work.  The system is in the den at one end of the house, so I'd need a way to change the music selection in other rooms.

[steve28]

Same boat here.  I have a 6-zone Home Theater Direct distribution amp in my network closet.  Currently I have an airport express in there and we use airplay to input audio to the system.  I currently have two Dots (v2) and the holy grail for audio is being able to use the Dot to pipe audio to it.

FWIW, the new Google Home devices have this capability.  The can "cast" audio over wifi to any Chromecast capable device - so you could attach a Chromecast Audio to your Russound system and use any Google Home to cast audio it.  You can also group Homes/Chromcasts together for synchronized playing (like a Sonos system).   Only issue is the Google Home is 2.5x the cost of a dot.