Alexa is outa sync

[NikNak]

Morning guys....

We have an Alexa speaker in the kitchen playing our local radio station. I have another that i have brought downstairs and using in the lounge while i decorate. Same radio station, both connected by wifi. But.... the one in the lounge is out of sync with the one in the kitchen by around 15-20 seconds. Why..??? Got me flummoxed

 

[sunnybob]

Its connected to a different server and comes to via america and south africa.

 

[Richard_C]

"Old" technology like FM radio simply took a signal in real time, amplified it and played it through a speaker. Any delay through the circuit boards was electron-speed imperceptible. New technology like DAB has to do more decoding and does some fancy buffering so you hear things uninterrupted and at the right pace (imagine a symphonic work, you want to hear it at the precise speed it was played and recorded at). You sometimes hear it if you listen to DAB on your car radio, it 'jumps back' a bit as you change broadcast area from FM to DAB in marginal signal areas.

We have 2 DAB radios in earshot of one another, different makes, different buffering, if you listen very carefully they are a fraction of a second apart by the time the speaker gets agitated and the sound comes out. We also have an FM radio which can be 10 seconds or so ahead of DAB.

I guess wifi radio must do some buffering as well. I don't use it so don't know. You would hope 2 devices with the same brand connected to the same network would be much closer than 15 seconds but maybe not, maybe Alexa's builders source the inner bits from a variety of suppliers.

If you have an ipad or iphone say "hey siri, why are my 2 alexa speakers out of sync". If you have an android phone, "hey google...same question". Or just ask Alexa?

 

[Inspector]

You have a dubbed Kung Fu/Ninja Alexa.

Pete

 

[pcb1962]

Morning guys....

We have an Alexa speaker in the kitchen playing our local radio station. I have another that i have brought downstairs and using in the lounge while i decorate. Same radio station, both connected by wifi. But.... the one in the lounge is out of sync with the one in the kitchen by around 15-20 seconds. Why..??? Got me flummoxed

You can synchronise them by creating a speaker group in the app, then when you want them both to play in sync you ask "Alexa play ... on <groupname>". You can still use each individually as normal.

 

[Trainee neophyte]

Obviously one of your Alexa devices has to send more data back to amazon for evesdropping/data - theft purposes. Astonishing that you would have one in the house, let alone several.



(It is possible that Poe's Law may be applied to this post)

 

[Marineboy]

You can synchronise them by creating a speaker group in the app, then when you want them both to play in sync you ask "Alexa play ... on <groupname>". You can still use each individually as normal.

That’s true to a point, multi room works fine for Spotify and any radio stations supported by something like Tunein. However, the BBC stopped using Tunein when their Sounds platform launched in 2019 and therefore lost this functionality. It is very annoying.