@CharlieLaub: It is possible to configure gstreamer to send the audio data over multicast. This way the TX side will send to a fixed multicast address (like 224.1.1.1) and each RX side listens on the same multicast address. Note that you may have to change your transport protocol to something like RTP to allow multicasting.
This way not only do you not need to reconfigure the TX side as RX devices can join and leave the multicast group at any time, but depending on how the wifi layer is configured, instead of the TX side sending N data streams it only needs to send data once, decreasing bandwidth usage.
To the OP: Standard wifi is definitely the way to go for sending the audio data as it solves so many problems and allows for a large amount of flexibility. The interesting bit is to make the sound "hifi", how to synchronize the word clock of the DAC on each RX end.
This way not only do you not need to reconfigure the TX side as RX devices can join and leave the multicast group at any time, but depending on how the wifi layer is configured, instead of the TX side sending N data streams it only needs to send data once, decreasing bandwidth usage.
To the OP: Standard wifi is definitely the way to go for sending the audio data as it solves so many problems and allows for a large amount of flexibility. The interesting bit is to make the sound "hifi", how to synchronize the word clock of the DAC on each RX end.
Yes, but AFAIK multicast does not work over a WiFi link so this would not help with the original problem.
Multicasting definitely works over wifi from a software perspective (gstreamer, etc). If the access point is not optimized for multicast then when transmitting device sends a packet to the access point, the AP will then broadcast it to all devices on the wifi network and those devices that are interested will pass the packet to running software.
Wireless speaker systems like Sonos or HEOS use UPnP (I have the latter), which uses a multicast addreses so that the phone app can discover devices on the wifi network. More complex network configurations may not support multicast (ie, across wired and wireless devices), but if every device is on the same wifi network then from a software perspective multicast works the same as a wired network.
I'm not an IT expert or electrical engineer who knows how the protocols and LAN traffic works on a very detailed level.
With that said, I can say that I was at one time very interested in multicasting audio over my WiFi local area network. I tried it. It didn't work, so I moved on to streaming N streams to N clients.
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