Uniti Neo / Atom and Echo

Posted by: ThomasD on 01 January 2019

My first post !  Happy New Year everyone !

I am about to pull the trigger on getting a Neo or Atom .  Not sure which one to get. Is there such a big difference? 

I am driving some rather old Audiovector M3 floor stand speakers.  I may upgrade these soon.

My question is related to integration with Amazon Echo. I currently have a echo dot plugged into my Cyrus 7 amp and I can walk into the room  and say 'Alexa play supertramp on HiFi' and off it goes streaming from spotify.   Brilliant and I love it.  Even my slightly technophobe wife is using it. 

The only wrinkle is that this relies on the rather iffy DAC in the echo dot.  It's not terrible at all,  but I  want better. 

With the Neo I guess this method remains the only way.   Unless someone has found a way to integrate the Neo/Atom so that it then gets its stream over the network rather than the echo.

Is this something a echo "skill" can be used for ?  Any ideas?  Is there a way to call the Neo/Atom an end point in the echo ecosystem ?

Thanks for any tips. 

Thomas 

 

 

Posted on: 01 January 2019 by ChrisSU

When you say Neo, do you mean Nova? Perhaps it has a different name in your location? If so, a Nova certainly has better sound quality than an Atom, but I think both might be wasted if they use the DAC in an Echo. 

Posted on: 01 January 2019 by ThomasD

Oops..   Nova of course.  But how to get the convenience of echo on it. 

Posted on: 01 January 2019 by Obsydian

There is no Alexa integration.

A shame as the Echo Show 2 is also Zigabee compatible, so id hoped maybe, but not.

Maybe we need someone to write a skill to at least start playlists, pause, etc..

I have not tried using Alexa to cast Amazon Music.

Posted on: 01 January 2019 by ThomasD

I just read about a USD200 up and coming device from amazon called Echo Link which is supposed to be the solution .  Until it appears we will not know how good it will be.  Looks like it will have a TOS output so it might answer all my questions.  It even has an Ethernet socket so it might actually be pretty useful. 

Has anyone seen this in the wild? 

Thomas