Most likely only the radiant 360 or WiFi speakers will work hubless. Maybe Bluetooth for hub 2. Guess we will have to wait and see.
I had no problem getting the audio hub connected to ST but can’t actually get it to announce anything. It works great with Spotify connect, which is something I wanted. With music playing through Spotify I can control volume and mute from ST but not play/pause or track controls, though this may be expected.
@Tyler - got any docs or troubleshooting steps?
Do we need the hub and speaker? Or can I just buy an M3 and have Sonos like announcements?
I’m curious about these as well… they look really good, but a Radiant 360 is twice the price of a Sonos 1, but I’m not sure that it’s twice as good, no matter how good the integration is.
The Radiant 360 is larger than a Play:1. It’s probably better to compare it to one of the larger Sonos speakers.
I don’t think this is correct. The other speakers are Wi-Fi enabled also:
http://cl.ly/image/2l442i0k3x2p
I’m still looking into the audio hub.
I guess I shouldn’t trust Samsung’s comparison site…I didn’t bother checking the individual docs.
I did notice when my M3 arrived that it had wifi also. However, you only use wifi if you don’t have a hub. I got the hub too. I may try to unpair one of them from the hub to see if ST reacts differently to me doing a direct connection. Seems odd that the hub wouldn’t be supported though…I have to imagine that most customers buying at that price point aren’t just looking for a nicer bluetooth speaker.
Well size isn’t always everything… 
Samsung is notorious for obfuscating the actual specs though, and I’m not even sure that they are listed anywhere – even after looking at the product manual and spec sheet.
A Play 5 is a decent amount of hardware (two tweeters, two 3" mid-range drivers, and one 3.5" woofer, each with a separate amp). The Radiant 360 has a bigger woofer, which might be better for bass, but only a single dome tweeter, and the setup (having the tweeter firing up while the woofer firing down) might not sound as good as a single Play 5, or even a couple of Play 1s to be honest.
I guess for announcements and what-not it might work perfectly fine, although I don’t know how good of a solution it is for music.
@Tyler I turned off the hub and connected one of the speakers directly and am seeing the same result - I can control the music but announcements do not work, either from the built-in features of ST (play a weather announcement, etc.) or using Big Talker.
Interestingly, I can’t get the M7 to connect to ST. It is found during discovery but I just get “an unexpected error has occured.” The M3 works fine.
Also, a usability note - when I have the 2 speakers grouped in the Samsung Multiroom app while using wifi connections and no WAF250 hub, the ST integration only connects to one speaker and when I do things like mute it only does it on that one speaker, basically breaking the grouping. I haven’t tried it when they are both connected to the hub, I’ll give that a shot. Some documentation on what should and should not work or what was tested would be helpful since this is an official integration.
1 Like
Looks like there’s no control whatsoever when there are 2 speakers connected to the hub. When I did this with just one speaker connected I had some limited control as mentioned previously.
Seems like whether this was designed for hub scenarios (which it appears it was not, which is a shame) or direct connection there are still some issues to work out. Let me know if we should take this offline - I’m happy to help you guys troubleshoot if needed.
1 Like
Removed previous comment - I didn’t realize the apps were still pointed to the speakers directly, still doesn’t work through the audio hub.
1 Like
There’s currently a bug affecting text-to-speech announcements. Basically, if you’re trying to make it say something that no ST device has said before, it won’t work. If you switch your announcement to “testing” and it works, this is likely what you’re up against.
No ETA on resolution yet.
2 Likes
Good info, thanks. That probably explains the issue I saw during testing.
So far I just keep finding issues - sorry @Tyler. 
Another one to report is that if you have 2 (or more, I presume) speakers grouped and you send an announcement to one of them it will break the group in the Samsung app.
I’ve assigned an engineer to review some of these comments. Interesting that it breaks the group - I don’t believe the integration has any support for groups.
We’ll dig in. Thanks!
Right, I assume the lack of awareness of hubs and groups is the root cause of the issues/limitations I’m seeing but it is a bit frustrating that my music playback gets all screwed up just because ST gives me a voice announcement. I’m happy to work with your engineer if that would help, just let me know.
1 Like
Is this Sonos specific? Because I’ve been using VLC Thing to pipe weather announcements and that works perfectly.
I’ve been thinking about either picking up one of the Samsung Radiant units or a Sonos proper, and I was under the impression that “any” announcement that you wanted to send through the house would work fine.
No. I’ve seen this with 3 non-Sonos devices.
I imagine weather reports are pretty well cached. Try piping something that you’re pretty sure has never been said by a ST speaker before. Maybe a random string of words.
Interesting, I hadn’t thought of that.
I tried setting a custom message to play but got an exception within the VLC Thing app, which I guess is expected and unsupported at this time.
I guess – for the time being – living with canned announcements is “acceptable”, since chances are that in my case I won’t want (or haven’t wanted) anything too custom.
In the long run though, it would obviously be nice if this was fixed.
If you set that same custom message to “testing”, does it work?
Yep.
I created a new “play custom message” and set it to “testing” and it worked. When I went in and changed the custom sound to “El Chupacabra” it gave me the exception.