Wifi Music Player w/ Raspberry Pi, Justboom DAC and Max2Play: Part 4 (Finale)

Final part of series of video showing how I set up a wifi music player using Max2Play, a Justboom DAC hat, and a Raspberry Pi 3 B.
In this video we review what we have done so far and give our wifi music player a test drive

Players:
IPeng
Orange Squeeze

[MaxPlay]

Great Finale! Thanks again for the positive words. We are looking forward to your proposed multiroom expansion ;)

[robertthewombat]

Thanks for this. It doesn't have one key piece of information that 'm looking for yet, but it looks like you might get there.

Way back in the '70s and '80s there were periods when I moved from place to place a lot, sometimes small apartments, sometimes just a room. Having anything approaching decent stereo was a huge hassle, and most of that was running wires. Obviously, when you're in places you don't actually own for just a few months or a year you don't really want to involve the actual building construction just to get music to speakers. Initially the problem was getting wires from the amp to each speaker, then with monitors or powered speakers and now with Bluetooth it was/is mostly getting a signal wire from speaker to speaker., if you value any sort of channel separation and imaging (which, apparently, many don't, anymore) The options of running wires under rugs in heavily-used areas or stapled around doorframes were a pain, unsightly and usually pretty unsatisfactory.

Even back then it seemed to be obvious to me that there had to be a better way. Access to power outlets was usually not a problem, so it was essentially just a problem of getting a signal across no more than 15 feet or so.

It's finally becoming possible, but while now there are a billion Bluetooth speakers and several very expensive proprietary multi-room solutions, for some reason the market still ignores the simple need to get different signals to right and left stereo speakers wirelessly. For all the tech we have the same basic problem from 40 years ago still goes unsolved.

Not saying that it's trivial given the current tech infrastructure. Getting things synchronized well enough on left and right channels exclusively over an explicitly very asynchronous protocol, without a common time signal of some sort or very precise clocks synchronized to a common source (another way of saying another information channel) is.. maybe not even theoretically possible. Obviously the tech required for multi-room stereo music can be altered to disable one channel each to two speakers easily, but I've been unwilling to spend several hundred dollars on proprietary systems just to find out whether the synchronization is really good enough (somehow), or if on the other hand there are reasons they don't tackle right-left separation with Wifi or Bluetooth and emphasize separate rooms instead. I do have lot of small speakers, DACs, small amps, some powered speakers, and Raspberry Pi's. The problem still bugs me after all these years, and I'm tempted to dig into it, it's the sort of thing I enjoy, but the timing is awkward. I'm facing a move (after decades in one place, this time) and don't know when I'll have the slack to experiment again.

[nopochoclos]

nice review, what about Dac model or Dac Quality? and play Flac files with any downsampling using full Dac specs, like 32 bit and 384khz...

[Phatride]

is it possible to play live audio from a tv or receiver and send that audio throughout the house with Max2Play. How is latency?