The holy grail for cheap-ass networked audio is a surround-sound set constructed from random (or a set of) Bluetooth speakers and some sort of wireless receiver. I can't tell you how many people came into my old workplace expected that to be possible, and being disappointed that the only options were somewhat expensive demi-audiophile WiFi-based (read: hooked into an app that required an internet connection and sometimes iOS) solutions from Sonos/Bose/B&W/Klipsch that locked you into their platform. IIUC latency and bandwidth are an issue?
This is a cool step in the right direction though.
I looked into using Bluetooth speakers for smarthome purposes a while ago. The audio is more than good enough, and it's a lot cheaper than "real" speakers. There's one major drawback, though: most BT speakers automatically turn off when they don't recieve audio for a while!
With networked audio, you'd want the speakers to stay on, idling until you want to push audio through them. Having to manually turn them on every time you want to use a speaker pretty much defeats the purpose.
I thought so too, but then, I could never manage it myself. I imagine a solution would be to build a receiver with a Bluetooth antenna for each channel, so that it would be device-agnostic, and a mic port for calibration. Maybe a traditional RCA port for a powered subwoofer.
But if it were so simple, I'm sure someone would have done it by now. There may also be weird licensing issues involved, like perhaps Dolby/DTS don't want to certify such a system, and so access to whatever you need to decode their signals isn't readily available.
I'm not sure you'd even need separate Bluetooth chips/antennas. In theory one device can connect to up to 7 others. Although, to be fair Bluetooth audio streaming is barely reliable with one device so maybe that is just asking too much of it.
Apparently Samsung phones can connect to two devices:
Yes, dual output is possible (there are receivers that do this today). However, BT4.2's low bandwidth limits the bitrate of sound that can be streamed, and I'm unclear on if each connection can receive different channels (basically, separate streams for each speaker), if it's limited to two identical stereo streams.
I am a layman, though; I just sold the stuff and therefore had an understanding of what people expected to be possible.
This is a cool step in the right direction though.