Disable auto power-off for speakers connected to Homey's line-out.

OpenMind_NL

I have a JBL Pulse 2 connected to Homey's line-out in order to get a more realistic sounding voice.

The speaker powers-off automaticly when there is no sound for about 10 minutes. So when Homey says something after more then 10 minutes of silence, the speaker has to power-on before there is some sound... and it takes a few seconds for that.
This means that I often only hear the end of a message... or even nothing...

I already contacted JBL about it, but they told me that there was no way to switch off the auto-power-thingy... it's a European regulation to save energy...

This got me thinking...
- The speaker won't switch off when there's always an input signal
- ...but I don't want to hear Homey sounds all day long
- What if Homey outputs a sound that I don't hear? Something like 10Hz or 20kHz sine waves?

A little Google search brought me to a website that offers all kinds of MP3 test-tones.
There was no 10Hz, but 20Hz was available.
I loaded the MP3 in Homey's Soundboard app and created a flow that plays the 20Hz sine wave every 8 minutes... and it works!

Site: http://www.testsounds.com/
Right column/ 7th link: Sinus 20Hz - 10dB (500KB) 

I hardly hear the 20Hz sound. In fact I don't hear it until I try to hear it... (JBL filters the output below 70Hz)
But most important: JBL Pulse 2 doesn't power-off anymore!

Maybe this helps other people, so I thought I should share it.

Now let's hope that Athom brings the correct filtering to the voice.
At this moment there's too much bass and not enought shhh in the voice over line-out.

GeurtDijker

Nice! Great solution! Thanks!

OpenMind_NL

I added the test-sound link to the first post because you might find a lot of porn-click-hunters (or other mess) during a Google search for the test-sounds.

GeurtDijker

I liked your solution so much I think it deserves a build-in feature in  Homey!
I created an Feature Request ;-) 
https://github.com/athombv/homey/issues/1528

GeurtDijker

Question from Athom is if we (the Community) could test "many" speakers with an example file before they try to implement this.
 
I see a +6 above this tread,
Who is experiencing this? pls reply here or in a PM to me  your name and mention the speaker(s) you have.  
If we have enough volunteers with  different brands we can coordinate and report what works!!

Rocodamelshe

I hope this "fix" comes with an option to turn it off because i don't want that sound files on my play 5.

OpenMind_NL

Rocodamelshe said:

I hope this "fix" comes with an option to turn it off because i don't want that sound files on my play 5.

Sure it would have enable/disable. But don't worry. Sonos Play 5 has a very low response at 10hz, like most speakers do. Their deep sound is mainly psycho-acoustic

http://www.avsforum.com/sonos-play5-review/