I’m an early adopter of many things. The moment the new Google Nest Audio speaker was announced, I bought two in order to set them up using their unique “speaker pair” capability. They sounds amazing – this is really good audio. I’ve really enjoyed casting music to the speaker pair and never had an issue, until a couple months ago.
I also bought a Chromecast 3rd generation with Google TV when it was announced. I plugged the device in, setup Youtube TV and was using it on a basement TV that I don’t use all that often. My wife started working from home in our basement and using the device to listen to music while working.
At some point after the initial setup, I noticed I couldn’t cast to the speaker pair. The timelines of both devices being setup were so far apart, I never thought they could be the issue. I worked on my Unifi setup, searching high and low for any settings that could impact Google Home (where you setup the speaker pair) or Chromecast audio. The same issue also impacted our Google Nest mini and other Google audio devices throughout the house.
It turns out the issue is just Google. They shipped the Chromecast with a software issue that it kills speaker pairs and disrupts Chromecast audio on a network. It wasn’t until I read this article at 9to5Google that it dawned on me the two devices could be interfering with each other. Sure enough, I unplugged the Chromecast and a few hours later every Google audio device on my network was back to working normal. Which means I now have a useless Google Chromecast dongle and remote.
