Whole house audio.

BLUF: What should I buy for a whole house audio setup?

Background: For whatever reason, I have an Aspie’s obsession to order and sort things (for instance I have a tool case filled with overly organized Command hooks and adhesive strips, where the strips are ordered with different strip types by row (regular, clear, water resistant, and velcro), and lengths by column (long, medium, short)). But house cleanliness has been rough. I found a system that works, and so when I pass significant milestones, I get a reward. My last reward was a sound bar for my large TV. My next rewards are to slowly buy speakers for whole home audio.

Needs:
- A system I can buy one module at a time.
- Compatible with Apple (preferrably Airplay).

Wants:
- Be able to play in multiple rooms while I clean.
- Be able to play my stuff in the den while my daughter plays something different in her room.
-Be able to handle playing different audio when my daughter is talking to her friends on my phone.

Questionables:
-Do I want the speakers to be “smart” with microphones? (I do have an iPhone and Apple Watch, so I would always have at least one microphone on me.)
-Do I want speakers that can add a second for stereo sound?
-I bought a Samsung soundbar at the time, not fully appreciating my later decision to want whole house audio.
-Do I want Sonos? Sonos seems to have most features, but the Sonos soundbar plus sub would have been about $1500 USD, and that was too much. But now I’m stuck with having to get a speaker for my den, no matter what brand I pick.

 

Roady, thank you for the answer. That’s the way I’ve felt based on my initial research.

 

@Roady, I wanted to thank you for your recommendation. I let my obsessive compulsion push me, but I got the Sonos One speakers, and they do exactly what I wanted. They sound very good.

Now, I’m just trying to figure out online if I should use the Sonos app or Apple AirPlay 2 via Homekit.

 

After some research and trial and error, essentially it looks like iOS Airplay will allow just about any app’s audio to be sent to the selected speaker, however if I wanted to play music in my bedroom and a podcast in the kitchen both from my phone, I cannot do that. Each Apple device can only send one source. The phone is essentially the media server (even if it is streaming from the internet)

Sonos on the other hand is limited to the supported apps (of which there are near 100), but the data goes directly to the speaker from the internet, making the phone a remote and the speaker the server. This allows having every speaker in the house to play something different.

Also, and I don’t remember which, but one is lossless data (Airplay I think) and the other is compressed.