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Xiaobian to share with you how to turn Raspberry Pi into a HiFi music system, I hope you have something to gain after reading this article, let's discuss it together!

HiFi Hardware

Using a dedicated PC to play background music is a bit much. It's expensive, noisy (unless it's quiet, which is more expensive), and not environmentally friendly. Even the cheapest ARM boards can do the job, but from a software point of view, they tend to be problematic. The Raspberry Pi is still relatively cheap, although not a standard computer, but it has good support in terms of hardware and software.

The next question is: what slightly to use. A good quality, active slightly is expensive. Passive slightly costs less but requires an amplifier, which requires adding another box to the set. They also have to use the Raspberry Pi's audio output; while it works, it's not the best, especially when you've invested in high-quality slightly and amplifiers.

Fortunately, among the thousands of Raspberry Pi hardware extensions are amplifiers with built-in digital-to-analog converters (DAC). We chose HiFiBerry's Amp. It was discontinued shortly after we bought it (replaced by the Amp+ model with a better sampling rate), but it was good enough for our purposes. With air conditioning on, I don't think you'd hear any difference between a 48kHz or 192 kHz DAC anyway.

As for the slightly, we chose the Audioengine P4, which was bought at a clearance sale in a store at an ultra-low price. It's easy to fill our office room with sound without distortion (and it can also be transmitted outside our room, with some distortion that engineers next door often don't like).

HiFi Software

On our old generic ARM SBC we needed to maintain an Ubuntu, using a fixed, old system kernel outside of the package repository, which was problematic. The Raspberry Pi OS includes a well-maintained kernel package that makes it a stable and easily updated base system, but it still requires us to regularly update Python scripts to access Spotify and YouTube. That's a little too high maintenance for our purposes.

Fortunately, using the Raspberry Pi as a base means there are many off-the-shelf software devices available.

We chose Volumio, an open source project that turns the Raspberry Pi into a music player. Installation is a simple step-by-step process. Installation and upgrades are completely painless, without the hassle of installing and maintaining an operating system and regularly debugging broken Python code. You don't need to edit any configuration files to configure HiFiBerry amplifiers, you just need to select from the list. Of course, it takes time to get used to the new user interface, but stability and ease of maintenance make the change worthwhile.

Volumio interface

Play music and experience

Although we worked from home during the pandemic, I installed my office HiFi in my home office, which meant I could run it freely. A constantly changing user interface can be painful for a team, but for someone with a R & D background to play with a device on their own, the changes are fun.

I am not a programmer, but I have a strong background in Linux and Unix systems administration. This means that while I find fixing broken Python code annoying, Volumio is perfect enough for me and boring enough (it's a good "problem"). Fortunately, there are many other possibilities for playing music on the Raspberry Pi.

As a terminal geek (I even started LibreOffice from a terminal window), I mostly use Music on Console (MOC) to play music from my NAS. I have hundreds of CDs, all converted to FLAC files. And I bought a lot of digital albums from BandCamp or Society of Sound.

Another option is the Music Player Daemon (MPD). Running it on the Raspberry Pi, I can interact remotely with my music over the web using one of the many Linux and Android clients.

After reading this article, I believe you have a certain understanding of "how to turn Raspberry Pi into a HiFi music system." If you want to know more about it, please pay attention to the industry information channel. Thank you for reading!

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