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Preamp/CD transport with media library+bluetooth capabilities. Does it exist?

albireo

albireo

pfm Member
I'm trying to reorganise my hi-fi listening setup around the sources we most often use around the house.

I was hoping people could give hints on whether the product I have in mind exists. Quick summary of my situation:

  1. I'm keeping my speakers, Dynaudio Focus Active 110A, because I like their sound really. These are actives as stated, so I won't need a power amp or speaker cable outputs. Don't mind if they're there though
  2. I have all the music I want to listen to. It's 80% ripped 44/16 FLAC files on a portable SSD drive, 20% CDs. In the future, I might move these files to a Synology NAS and access them via the home wifi. So ideally this device would offer capabilities for accessing and playing FLAC files sitting on some media, whether local or on NAS
  3. My wife would like to use the speakers occasionally to stream music from her phone (ogg vorbis I've ripped for her) via bluetooth to the speaker
So I won't need radio, special subscriptions to music services, anything Apple, Tidal or Spotify etc. I have the music I want to listen to, I just need a hub to 1) browse it and 2) send it to the speakers. For the FLAC files, I will need something able to read the Flac tags, because all my files are labelled with artist, album, track name, disc number, composer etc. So I would imagine I'd need either something with a largeish display or with a phone app (something that runs Foobar2000 would be great, as all my music is tidily sorted by Foobar's media library)

What I'm thinking of is some sort of hybrid CD transporter streamer perhaps?
  1. If there's a DAC in, that's great. I will then need this streamer to give me RCA inputs to the speaker and some sort of volume control
  2. Otherwise I'll get a separate DAC with volume control/variable outputs, and the device I'm looking for will need optical/SPDIF feeding into my DAC
Importantly, I'll need bluetooth, otherwise we'll end up spending more money to buy those tiny bluetooth speakers whose battery will fail in 1 year or two.

I have made a go at going in this direction with a Rasperry Pi 3 + Allo Signature SPDIF feeding into my Benchmark DAC. I used Volumio. Not impressed. The little brick would overheat, sometimes it wouldn't boot, sometimes you needed lengthy updates, there was no bluetooth and my CD collection sat dead.

Any hints and tips for a do-it-all preamp/CD transport/bluetooth device appreciated. Price is not a concern if the features are there because this will be my main music interface for a long time.
 
lordmortlock said:
Lindemann Musicbook Source.

the one Simon has for sale doesn’t have the cd transport in, you could easily add an external disc slot, like the apple SuperDrive or the Hifi rose transport.

They’re absolutely brilliant.
Click to expand...

Thanks. One thing that It's not immediately clear to me is whether this device will be able to scan, organise, decode and play a library of my own FLAC files stored on an HDD/SSD directly connected to it via USB. I do not have a NAS at the moment and do not plan on setting one up for the foreseeable future.
 
albireo said:
Thanks. One thing that It's not immediately clear to me is whether this device will be able to scan, organise, decode and play a library of my own FLAC files stored on an HDD/SSD directly connected to it via USB. I do not have a NAS at the moment and do not plan on setting one up for the foreseeable future.
Click to expand...

You can certainly plug a hard drive in and it will read it, as per spec below. I haven’t had first hand experience of how well it organises, or reads organisation though. Maybe @simon g has?

Network player
Ethernet: 100 Mbit/s
WLAN: Dual-band 802.11a/b/g/n/ac, WPS support
Bluetooth: 4.2, A2DP
USB: High-speed host interface for harddisks, USB sticks, DVD ROM drives, max. output current 1.5 A
Supported codecs: WAV, FLAC, AIFF, ALAC, MP3, AAC,
Ogg Vorbis, WMA, DSD
UPnP and DLNA support
 
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