So if I want a Sonos-equivalent, but from a different company, who sells wireless multi room speakers that are happy to pull from Fileserver, mobile or Spotify and that also do internet radio?
@HalvarFlake maybe Yamaha MusicCast?

@HalvarFlake Play-Fi kit (I think) are an option https://play-fi.com/products/

Less expensive but also BYO🔈: https://audiocast.io/

Play-Fi

DTS Play-Fi is a premium wireless audio ecosystem for whole-home music and TV audio, supporting high-resolution and sub-millisecond playback accuracy.

@HalvarFlake

I have a Raumfeld One in use. It can do Internet radio and act as spotify connect device. Also useable via google home, but less reliable than spotify connect.

I bought it before the teufel merge. It is working flawless ever since.

It is only used as spotify connect device currently

@HalvarFlake Slim Devices, who Logitech killed :-/
@HalvarFlake I tried harmon and kardon, hardware is good software is shit. Maybe teufel is good enough but I think one day I will build one oss with pion on top of raspberrypi, that is not shit.
@HalvarFlake I've basically given up on this entirely and I'm just using Dante to a central mixer with a NUC acting as a Chromecast and Airplay server on it. It's stupid, but the Sonos software stack is creepy and everything else seems to be creepy and bad, and this way I can get time-aligned replay across arbitrary speakers.
@HalvarFlake why don't you want sonos? (So we can pinpoint the target feature set)
@WowSuchCyber because i am livid with them for the way they deprecated all my gen1 speakers, and would rather pay a competitor twice the money in the future.

@HalvarFlake I think the "integrated systems" ( a speaker that contains an amp and a little iot device that does networking, runs a vague Linux, connects to Spotify) will always depreciate very fast.

If you want to protect from that you can separate speakers (that are the same since the 70´s basically) from the amps ( that are the same since the 90´s if you use A/B amps) and the system. But then you enter a rabbit hole that you're not prepared to enter, even as an old IT geek, if I may :-)

@HalvarFlake here is the whathifi roundup of the best multi-rooms https://www.whathifi.com/best-buys/streaming/best-multi-room-systems
Best multi-room wireless systems 2023

Want to play all the music in the world at the touch of a button, all around your home? You want a wireless multi-room system

whathifi
@HalvarFlake may be more than you were thinking budget wise, but Bang and Olufsen have been doing multi-room even longer than Sonos. And you get unique looking speakers too