Multiroom audio without brand lock-in: the guide to a Hi-Fi system spread across your home

Anyone evaluating a multiroom system almost always ends up at the same fork in the road: Sonos or HEOS give you a ready-to-use experience, but tie you into buying speakers from the same brand for every room. Anyone who already has a Hi-Fi system, a good amplifier, or speakers they don't want to give up often finds themselves locked out of these closed ecosystems.

What "open multiroom" means

An open multiroom system synchronizes playback across multiple rooms using the hardware the user already owns — amplifiers, speakers, DACs from different brands — instead of requiring proprietary products. gtCore Pro works this way: each room has its own Raspberry Pi with its own DAC/amplifier connected, and getile audio synchronizes playback across the instances without dictating what hardware you use downstream.

How a multiroom setup with getile audio (gtCore) is structured

1. One Raspberry Pi per room, each with its own DAC or amplifier connected — an audio HAT or a USB DAC, depending on what you already own.
2. A gtCore Pro license on each node ($148 one-time, per unit — not a per-room fee).
3. A stable home network: multiroom sync runs over the local network, so an Ethernet connection is preferable to WiFi where possible, especially with several rooms active at once.
4. A single browser interface to control every room, switch source per room, or play the same track everywhere at once.

Signal quality: DAC and DSD

Multiroom shouldn't mean compromising on quality. getile audio handles direct USB output to the DAC, with native DSD support up to DSD512 and SoX quality=10 resampling when the signal needs adapting to the connected DAC. In practice: whether you're listening in one room or five at once, the signal path stays the same, with no extra conversion steps imposed by the system.

A further practical advantage: the shared remote

With getile audio, the phone or tablet never streams the audio itself — it only acts as a remote. That means several people, from several devices, can add tracks to the same queue at the same time — just as useful in a multiroom setup as it is in a single room during a dinner with guests — and an incoming call on one of the phones never interrupts playback in any room.

When it's NOT the right fit

If you need a single native mobile app to manage every room on the go, or you'd rather have a "ready in a box" system without touching separate Raspberry Pis for each room, a closed ecosystem like Sonos remains more immediate — at the cost of brand lock-in. Worth knowing before you choose, not after.

For setting up the first node, the "Hi-Fi in 10 minutes" guide covers the whole process step by step.