As I already own an Asus RT-AC5300 and RT-AC68W, I wanted to set up an AiMesh network. I also have multiple Alexa speakers, so Lyra Voice seemed like a natural choice. It's an AC2200 router, an Alexa-enabled stereo speaker, and Bluetooth that can top that. The advantage of this device as a router is that the WiFi range is not bad. After setting up the AiMesh network, I saw that several of my WiFi devices were immediately registered to this router and not my main router. I checked the download/upload speed on one of my connected computers, not bad either. The speaker isn't bad either. While it lacks a bit of bass, the overall sound is balanced, which isn't bad for its size. I've asked Alexa to play music on it and it's stereo, but my Echo and Echo Dots aren't. Now the worst. First, Asus is very slow in releasing firmware. When I bought the device, many important Alexa features were not supported, such as E.g. ads and embeds, multi-room music, etc. After a few months, ads and embeds were supported, but at the time of writing this article, MRM is still not supported and Asus has not updated the firmware since September 2019. If I can live with the limited Alexa capabilities on this device, now this is the part I can't live with: It crashes my entire network, wired and Wi-Fi in general, and I don't understand why. At first I thought my main router was down, restarted it, didn't help, then I called FiOS CS, the lady was very patient, helped me reset FiOS modem etc, didn't help. Then I found Alexa not responding on Lyra Voice so I restarted the device and my network came back. Then it kept happening, each time I had to turn Lyra Voice off and on again and the problem was gone. I've now decided to put the device on hold, maybe until Asus releases the next firmware update and see if the issue is resolved.
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