SRS-X9 and Google Cast

[pauhunte8]

Hi guys,

Bought and X9 a while ago and love the sound.  SongPal is a pain to use - not v. friendly - so have been using iTunes on a laptop to drive this.  However have since bought and X77 and enjoying the google cast facility that is built into these newer speaker versions.

As I understand it the X99 added googlecast support and the X9 doesn't have this.  Bah.  Is this likley to be added in a future update - or is this very unlikley or indeed impossible?

Wondering whether I could buy a chromecast audio thingy and plug that in to make it visible for casting.  Do you think that would work - seems like a hack - and I guess there might be some conflict with the built-in wifi signalling?

Any opportunity to upgrade my X9 to an X99 do you think?

Any thoughts much appreciated.

Cheers

Paul

[Sonyvores]

I don't really see what complicated to use songpal...Specially with the new drop/drag bubble features

But to anser you, X9 can't be software upgraded to have chromecast since it requires a hardware upgrade. If you really want that chromecast feature on the X9, using the chromecast audio doogle as you suggested it will work, no problem. it won't have wifi conflict since if you're using the googlecast audio dongle, X9 will need to be set on line in.

[pauhunte8]

Thanks for taking the time to respond.  I suspect your right and my only option would be the chromecast dongle.

I can't help wonder though .. what new hardware would actually be required?  The speaker already has the transport channel (i.e. wifi enabled) and audio streaming is presumably HTTP/URLs or some other software protocol over wifi.

Are you saying there needs to be a physical piece of google stamped hardware that needs to be wired into the unit in order to receive and/or process chromecast audio signals.  Seems to me that all of that could be done with software rather than hardware... no?  Maybe it's just a licensing issue rather than a technical issue that is obstructing such a software update?

Regarding SongPal, it's the clumsy navigation system .. many clicks to drill through your music or radio channel catalogue to find what you want.  Other apps are much nicer in this regard... TuneIn for example..  Plus a much wider range of app content is becoming cast enabled.  SongPal has only limited offerings... for example I can't get media content from the BBC iPlayer (or iPlayer Radio) via SongPal.

If Sony only put a 1/10th of their effort into software as they do their hardware .. their software has always been a a bit rubbish / limited (compared to what the app market offers)...