Sonocotta’s Louder ESP32 Mini Upgrades Your Old Speakers

If you’re in the market for a new smart speaker, you’ll read plenty about the processing and connectivity capabilities of the available options. You’ll probably also find a lot of information about the advanced AI models that power each device on the backend. What you won’t hear so much about is the speaker itself. It’s understandable that the rest of the tech gets a spotlight in a gadget like this, but after the speaker carries out a request to play a song, don’t we want it to sound good?

Of course we do. That’s exactly why Sonocotta designed what they call the Louder ESP32 Mini. It is a smart speaker that actually has no speaker at all. You connect it to your existing, high-quality speaker that you love, and it instantly becomes a smart speaker. The Louder ESP32 Mini comes equipped with everything else that is required to connect to Home Assistant, Apple AirPlay 2, or your own custom software.

The board replaces the speaker terminal on many passive speakers with a small module available in 42 x 42 mm and 52 x 52 mm versions. Installation requires little more than removing the existing terminal cup, connecting the internal speaker wires to the onboard WAGO connectors, and securing the new board in place with the original screws. This transforms the speaker into a network-connected device without sacrificing sound quality.

The Louder is built around an ESP32-S3-WROOM-N8R8 module with 8 MB of flash and 8 MB of PSRAM, giving it enough memory to handle audio buffering and wireless streaming. Audio is handled by a TAS5805M Class-D amplifier and DAC, which also includes an integrated digital signal processor. Instead of relying entirely on software running on the microcontroller, the onboard DSP can perform equalization, dynamic range compression, FIR filtering, automatic gain limiting, and other audio processing directly in hardware. That makes it possible to tune speakers for better performance while reducing the processing burden on the ESP32.

Users can flash firmware for ESPHome to integrate with Home Assistant, install Squeezelite-ESP32 for Spotify Connect, AirPlay, Bluetooth, and Logitech Media Server compatibility, or use Snapclient for synchronized multi-room audio. Developers who want complete control can build their own firmware using the Arduino IDE or PlatformIO, making the board just as appealing for custom products and research projects as it is for home audio upgrades.

Whether you're building a smart home audio system, prototyping a connected speaker, or simply giving an old set of bookshelf speakers a second life, Louder ESP32 Mini offers a low-cost way to combine modern wireless streaming with audio hardware that may already outperform many off-the-shelf smart speakers. It is currently available with prices starting at $15.