Chromecast Audio

~ the obituary ~

Google has never run its hardware store in Turkey. Every Nexus phone and every Chromecast that turned up here came through a reseller taking a margin or in somebody's luggage, which works well enough for a four hundred dollar phone and stops working entirely for a thirty-five dollar disc. Chromecast Audio was priced to be an impulse buy in the countries Google sold it in. Move it across a border and the shipping cost more than the product did.

It went on sale on 29 September 2015, the same day as the second video Chromecast, and it was the same object with one port changed. A disc a little wider than a large coin, concentric grooves pressed into the top so it read as a tiny vinyl record, micro-USB on one edge for power. Where the video model had an HDMI stub, this one had a 3.5mm jack. That was the entire difference and the entire product.

You put it in the back of an amplifier you already owned, or into a pair of powered speakers, and those speakers joined the wi-fi network. After that any phone in the house could send music to them without pairing to anything, because casting is not bluetooth. The phone hands over a stream address and steps out of the way, so the music keeps going when a call comes in or you walk out the front door. For thirty-five dollars a stereo bought in 1998 became a thing your guests could queue songs on.

~ the case file ~

~ what the jack was hiding ~

The 3.5mm socket was two sockets. It took an ordinary analog cable, and it also took a mini-TOSLINK plug, which meant the same hole could hand a digital signal straight to a proper converter in your amplifier and skip Google's own. The converter inside was an AKM part rated to 192kHz, which is a strange thing to find in a dongle at that price. Google put an analog cable in the box and said almost nothing about the optical option.

On 10 December 2015 an update added the two things people had asked for on day one. Playback went up to 96kHz at 24 bits, and several units could be put into a group in the Chromecast app so one phone drove every room at once with the streams held in sync. Multi-room audio at that point was a Sonos feature costing several hundred dollars a room. Here it cost thirty-five.

~ the people who kept them ~

The audience for this thing was narrow and it was loyal. If you already owned speakers you liked, the whole smart-speaker category read as an insult: a worse driver in a worse box, sold on the strength of a microphone nobody asked for. Chromecast Audio made the opposite offer. It assumed your speakers were fine and that the only missing part was a network address.

Which is also why it sold the way it did, once. A dongle that upgrades hardware you already own is a purchase you make one time per stereo, and there are not many stereos. Google Home was a purchase you make per room, repeatedly, and it arrived with a microphone attached to an advertising company. Anyone could see which of those two lines Google was going to keep.

~ the eleventh of january ~

The clearance came before the announcement, the way it usually does. Over the 2018 holiday season the price fell to fifteen dollars and stayed there, and the stock never came back. On 11 January 2019 Google confirmed to the press that Chromecast Audio was finished, with the reasoning that it now had plenty of products for listening to music. Existing units kept working and kept getting firmware, which is more than most of the entries in this file were given.

The gap has never closed at the price. There are network streamers with a line out for a hundred dollars and up, and there are smart speakers with a microphone in them. Nothing at all sits in the shape of a thirty-five dollar puck that turns any speaker in the house into a target. Google built the cheapest possible answer to a question people kept asking, then decided it preferred the expensive one.

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