Show HN: Stream vinyl (any RCA) to your Sonos system using RPi and open-source | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Stream vinyl (any RCA) to your Sonos system using RPi and open-source

github.com

17 pointsmfi10 comments

I just finished my latest project here at home, setting up my vinyl player to stream to my Sonos system using a Raspberry Pi.

When looking into streaming my vinyl player to the Sonos system, I realized that the “official” way of doing this is to buy a Sonos Port, which costs >$400 where I live. So instead I spent waaayy too much time packaging a set of open-source services into a pre-built Raspberry Pi image that reads a stream from any vinyl player (RCA) and streams it to the Sonos system.

Hopefully this will simplify the setup for someone else here :)

Setup:

* It’s running on a Raspberry Pi + a USB analog to digital converter

* “pi-gen” is used to build the custom RPi image from scratch

* “Darkice” is used as a live audio streamer, reading the stream from the vinyl player

* “Icecast” is used as a streaming media server which streams the live audio from Darkice and broadcast it out in the local network.

* The Sonos speakers are then pointed to this local stream through the Sonos app.

Do you think there’s a way to do the same with AirPlay 2 without the use of an iDevice in the middle?

THANK YOU!

I have a large vinyl collection but have not been excited to spend $450+ for Sonos Port (or its predecessor which name escapes me). Getting this up and going will be my next weekend project for sure.

Glad that it will come to use! If there's something unclear or something that doesn't work during the setup, feel free to create an issue and I'll try to answer any question :)

The $250 Sonos Era 100 can take 3.5mm in with a dongle, but if you already have other Sonos gear and a Pi this is definitely a more reasonable solution.

The idea of putting vinyl though a ADC/DAC feels very wrong.

There is nothing to worry about. We've had lossless conversion between analog and digital audio for decades thanks to Shannon-Nyquist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM

I guess people are listening to vinyl for different reasons. For me, it's not about the superior music quality of running it end-to-end analog. For me it's the ritual that I really like. Putting on this clunky record, clean it and listen to the album song by song, as the artist intended it to be listened to.

I love vinyl - thanks for sharing!

You're welcome, hope it helps :)

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