My Audio setup

In this article I will give a little big of background to my music system and why I use the certain components.

First, the speakers: I use some speakers which enable me to give input via USB. This has the great advantage I can use whatever computer I want to push the music signals to the speakers. (side note: I am using some speakers by Nubert, which also have digital and analogue input for other sources) My music comes directly from a raspberry pi with Mopidy and Raspotify. These two tools allow me to play basically all the music I have on hard disk or to stream it from the internet. I also programmed some small software, that shows the title and artist on a small display and I added some buttons, so I can pause the track and turn the pi off.

The connection using USB is actually very great since it reduces the amount of cables a lot. Before this, I used an external sound card, which also worked well, but needed more space. Another option would be HiFiBerry, but I do not have any experience about sound quality.

Why did I use this setup and not buy directly speakers like from Sonos or other systems? I like to keep my system as easy to repair and change as possible. My speakers will probably last longer than my raspberry, so I want to able to change the way music comes to the speakers. Also, I want to be able to change my streaming service. All this might or might not be possible using out-of-the-box systems.

And finally, the raspberry pi and mopidy are open systems, where you can add your own code in order to improve your setup.