---
author:
    email: mail@petermolnar.net
    image: https://petermolnar.net/favicon.jpg
    name: Peter Molnar
    url: https://petermolnar.net
copies: []
lang: en
published: '2023-11-11T04:45:00+00:00'
summary: The year 2023 reminded me of my mortality quite a bit, so I took a good,
    deep look at my home setups in case someone else ever needs to be able to understand
    it, use it, maintain it. I decided to start with something that we use day to
    day - music and video playing.
title: The quest for simple, hight quality music and video playback in 2023

---

## About snowflake setups

Many things in my setups work for me, it is not always user, let alone
child friendly. Because I want to ensure I'm not the singular bus factor
for the setup, I need to think of the following:

-   things need to be able to run on their own, long term
-   they need to be simple enough so any family members can use it,
    children included
-   someone with a baseline IT knowledge can learn how to maintain it
-   can't be a super-snowflake setup that's impossible to replace with
    something paid for, hosted, or bought

This is not easy, and with the ongoing enshittification of
everything[^1] it'll only get harder: new devices are cloud connected,
they rely on streaming platforms which will, eventually, go bust, and in
the meanwhile support for local media gets forgotten. Did you know
Chromecast doesn't support DivX and old AVI formats natively[^2], so you
can't cast these without transcoding?

## My journey with audio and video

Over 10 years ago we moved to England and I left my "hifi" - a Panasonic
SA-AK18 *which had a better service manual[^3] than any device I ever
owned, despite falling into Black Plastic Crap category* - in Hungary as
it was too large to fit first in a shared accommodation, then in a one
bedroom rented flat. I had a jack - RCA cable connected to it which went
in from my computer, and if I wanted to play music, I used either that
connection, or CDs.

Once we got here I still wanted music so I got two small Panasonic
speakers for \~£20 and a cheap but hyped car amplifier, a Lepai
LP-2020A, for a similar price from eBay, and continues the same
connection to the laptop. *When I finally brought the old speakers to
the UK I realised they sounded much better in my memories, then they
actually did, and I wasted quite a lot of valuable space in the car boot
with them. They ended up being donated to a charity.*

Later I bought a Topping MX3[^4] all-in-one (DAC, headphone- and power
amplifier) as an upgrade to overcome the issues with the Lepai (eg.
terrible balance). The Topping, in it's category, is a marvel, and
sounded incredible with those absurdly cheap speakers. At this point I
had my home server connected to it, running MPD on the local music, but
I was listening more and more to Spotify over headphones at work.
Eventually I had a Raspberry Pi (see the addendums) running MPD[^5], and
raspotify[^6] for Spotify Connect.

Turn a few years: the pandemic and the lockdowns happened, we missed out
on concerts and fun, and ended up buying a decent set of speakers,
namely a pair of Dali Oberon 5[^7]s. I kept the Topping, because on
paper, it had just enough power for the floorstanders, and foolishly
didn't listen to the people in Richer Sounds that it won't. I adore
these speakers, the bring out so many extras in songs I never noticed
before, and I can only recommend them.

Videos, in my childhoold were VHS tapes, later .avi files on the
computer, and for many years, I simply connected the computer to the TV
or the largest monitor in the house and watched them that way.

When streaming started to pick up the lack of widevine on linux only
allowed 480p on many platforms. This forced me to look into other
possibilities: at first our pre-WebOS LG smart TV was adequete, but it
soon got abandoned by providers, so we eventually got a Chromecast with
Google TV[^8]. The TV can still receive DivX DLNA casts natively, and
the Chromecast can do the rest, but it's fascinating to see how short
lived a full era of early computer video had become due to licencing
issues.

## When music quality kicks you in the teeth

A little while ago we attended to a birthday celebration where the owner
had a nicely sounding HiFi setup (B&W speakers, some way too expensive,
class A amplifier, etc), playing some tunes in the background. One of
those songs stood out with the clarity of the guitar[^9], so when I got
home I decided to hear it on my setup.

It wasn't entirely disappointing - knowing it costed minimum an order of
magnitude less, it was pretty good -, but it was certainly lacking:
those guitar strings lacked the same tingling in certain ranges. I did
try if re-arranging would help: a tiny bit, but I can't afford that kind
of repositioning with a whirlwind toddler around.

And so I started searching how I could improve upon it. I marched upon
audiophile forums, and my dear, there be dragons of insanity[^10], but
not everything audiophiles say is nonsense.

Over 20 years ago, in the high school studio, there was a patch board
with printed circuit boards. I have witnesses, including musicians, that
plain those circuit boards with nothing but jack sockets on them can
emit music if driven hard enough, for example the pre-amp output of an
ancient Sound Blaster card. We didn't want to believe our eyes and ears,
but there it was, so when amplifier engineers say things like "circuit
board: bad" because "sound always moves", they are not incorrect.

Another thing I can stand behind is some description of speakers:
analytical vs musical. When we went to test some speakers we were shown
a set of them first, and once finished listening, all I could say is
that I hear every instrument, every detail - just not the music. That's
when we were shown the Dali Oberon 5, which sounded much closer to our
preference.

Experienced audio engineers can provide valuable insights, like why
listening to music on a lot of audio bricks[^11] gets tiring after a
while[^12]. Also thanks to comparison videos from E Project[^13] because
they made the choice much easier.

*A detour: among the videos I came across a few which lead me down
another rabbit hole: "Combination Tones"[^14] - the effect of how 2
higher pitched sound can generate a 3rd phantom low pitch sound in our
ears, due to biology. Apparently an avantgarde artist, Maryanne Amacher,
exploited this with her music[^15], but I'm not ready to listen to a
piece to which people referred to "it had ghosts in it" just yet.*

After much time spent on reading opinions, forums, listening to tests
and comparisons between brands like Cambridge Audio, NAD, Audiolab,
Rega, Yamaha, Marantz, etc. we decided that the sound we preferred,
based on recordings, is NAD.

The cheapest, simplest, and still AB class amplifier NAD sales is the C
316BEE v2[^16]: analogue line-ins, no digital boards - nothing that gets
obsolete in a year when the next shiny-shiny comes out, so this is what
we got. *Amplifier class doesn't matter; my reason for AB was that I
wanted oldschool and simple.*

*Sidenote: apparently, in Europe it's a law that banana plug sockets
need to be plugged in when the appliance is sold, so one needs to remove
the plugs first. That is because the EU power adapter fits the banana
sockets, and vice versa... I wasn't aware of this, so I first removed
the banana plugs themselves, only to learn that I could have simply
pulled those socket covers out. And no, this is not mentioned in the
manual at all.*

Once the NAD was plugged in it far superseded my expectations. To keep
it as simple as possible, we (my wife an me) both made the following
observations:

-   there's a lot more clarity at low volume - before, we had to turn it
    up to hear the music and the small things in the music well,
    especially the bass. Now the music is clearer, even well below
    conversation level loudness.
-   the baseline hiss of the Topping is gone
-   the bass is in another league; compared to the Topping it's
    thundering, which is a good thing, and was one of the main reasons
    why we were told to get a decent amplifier with the speakers in the
    first place
-   the formerly muffled tones are now just as clear as the rest

However, I want to stop here. "How to stop rewriting your site and write
more"[^17] is a problem for us with websites, and searching for the
perfect audio gear is a very similar problem. It's easy to keep going
instead of enjoying the music. I'm joyous with the current setup and
have no desire to seek thousands of pounds worth of gear, as after a
certain point, one would need to spend orders of magnitude more money
only to get a tiny bit better sound.

But the hardware is just in element in the whole chain.

There are many studies out there that most people can't tell the
difference between a 320kbps MP3 and CD - and that is true if you're
listening to a random song. It is most certainly not true when you're to
listening to something you know from CD and the gear you're listening on
is good enough.

"The Smell of Rain" from Mortiis[^18] had an official "redux" mp3
release, which I listened to for years. One day, out of curiosity, I got
a copy of the CD and I was speechless: there are sounds on the CD
release I never heard before, it essentially introduced a new layer to
me in the music. The lossy compression was hiding it all.

We all got used to the limitations of our setups (*cassettes copied from
a copy of a copy of a cassette recorded from FM radio... the good old
days*) then later, to lossy music, and many of us have no idea what a
decent, not even silly expensive setup (read: below £1000, newly
bought), that's playing from CD is truly capable of.

Coming to this realisation I decided to try Tidal, which does
offer CD streaming quality, unlike Spotify - and yes, it sounds much
nicer. And it also sucks, because the hacks that used to enable Tidal
Connect on a Raspberry are now dead[^19] and the available hack to use
it, like the upmpdcli plugin for Tidal is significantly less user
friendly, like librespot[^20], which just exposes itself as a Spotify
Connect speaker.

Following the usability credo I needed something that allows us to use
either Tidal or Spotify, and it came down to some sort of Chromecast.

I soon learnt that Google used to sell a device
called Chromecast audio[^21], but discontinued some years ago. It costs
more used, than when it was new, yet it's still 1/3rd of the price of a
WiiM Pro[^22] which seems to be the cheapest, audio oriented, Chromecast
capable device currently on the market.

When I plugged the second hand Chromecast audio in I thought I got
played: there was a rhytmic noise, like a train. Turned out the device
is fine: it was the low quality power supply I plugged it into.
Apparently this little thing is cheap because it lacks a lot of filters
and extras the more expensive devices have, so it really needs a nice,
high quality power supply, preferable it's original.

Nonetheless: it's sound quality is amazing. To me, it sounds better,
than the Topping as DAC.

**Update (2023-12-03)**: for now, I went back to Spotify. Tidal has weird issues,
and it regularly had buffering problems.

## Controlling and browsing

I miss the physicality of CDs, casettes, VHS tapes, but I admire how
accessible endless collections of music had become. To keep my ripped CD
collection usable I used to run MPD on some sort of capable device,
because MPD clients had great interfaces to browse what's available.

With this Chromecast oriented setup I had to find an alternative, which
could do the same, and the answer was an Android app called
BubbleUPnP[^23]. I don't like having to pay for software, but ever since
I can afford donating or tipping, I'm happy to do that. Sometimes there
are exceptions, and BubbleUPnP is one of them, because it's worth it.

It's an immensely useful little app for Android that can act both as
UPnP/DLNA control point and a UPnP media renderer. This means that it
can play network media - or it can send it to something to play it. It
can even transcode (!) if it needs to, so no need for the source to
support transcoding.

To me, this is important, because the backend is a minidlna[^24] server.
It's as simple as it gets, and even some routers have it installed. No
setup needed, it's all through zeroconf, and it just works.

*Less of a plus is the lack of catalogue, covers for video files, or the
ability to set age limits (Jellyfin has that). However: looking back at
my childhood I could have watched movies recorded in VHS that were
definitely not for me - I didn't want to. I wanted to see Star Wars for
the 6000th time instead, so this may not pose as much of a threat as I
think it could. Time will tell, I'll come back to this problem when the
now \<2 years old has a phone and wants to watch Alien.*

This was local audio and video can be browsed from any Android device in
the family, casted or viewed locally, with no issues at all.

## Conclusions

I have access to millions of hours of audio and video today, but that
access' usability is definitely not on par with the simplicity of
inserting a disc, a casette, or a VHS tape and simply pressing "play".
Then there's also the loss of nice, physical album art, but that is
another topic.

If I was Windows or Mac oriented, my life would be simpler, and I could
have simply dedicated a machine as media center, because on those
systems, the streaming services are willing to show decent quality. If
you're on Win/Mac, keep it simple, and use an older machine to do this,
it'll make your life much, much simpler.

MPD is a brilliant system for local music playback, and once set up,
it'll probably run forever.

Every and all hobby has rabbit holes, though some might be more
expensive, than others - audio is dangerous, because there's always
something nicer, more special, newer.

Some audiophiles are simply mad, others have the curse of exceptional
hearing. Audio is subjective. If you like it, it's OK. More expensive
won't always or won't necessary make it better for you. The class of the
amplifier will also not determine how much you like the sound.

I always try to buy things that last, but with technology I tend to go
cheap and tinker. Part of it is wanting to be in control, another is
wanting to understand my stack. For local things where updating is not
an issue and which don't need to connect to ever changing APIs this
approach works, and it's even usable, but when it comes to streaming
services where everyone tries to protect their turf the tinkered
solutions will eventually break. If I want to avoid that I need to buy
in to some of the solutions. Chromecast works as DLNA was meant to work,
but it's closed, and it plays nasty with anything that's not android or
Google based. It probably also syphons a stupid amount of semi-private
data to Google, but regardless of this, I couldn't find anything that
works overall better.

I'm starting to dislike Rasbperry Pi based solutions. It's cheap board
which is used for a lot of things it was never really meant to be used
for, hacks on top of hacks. Sometimes getting the right tool for the
right job is worth it instead of trying to apply a swiss army knife.

The same goes for the lottery of wonders-of-the-internet products. The
current Chinese audio brick rage is around Fosi and S.M.S.L. audio, like
it was some years ago for Topping. Don't get me wrong: some of these
products are absurdly good, but if not, you're out of your money. The
price of an S.M.S.L. AL200 is more or less the price of the NAD C316BEE
and the latter will be better made and will outlive the Chinese brick
for sure. My Topping has already developed weird quirks, like it's flaky
volume button, the rubbish from start remote control, and occasional
freezing at which point it needs to powered off and on.

## Addendum #1: A Raspberry Pi with extras for local source playback

There are ready made images for audio on Raspberry Pi, but Volumio[^25]
, moOde audio player[^26], or rAudio[^27] all failed me at some point.

Volumio is closed source, moOde and rAudio are open, but they all have
one thing in common: a web based interface, which makes them incredibly
slow on the Pi 3B.

They also don't play nice with custom configurations for MPD, and none
of them is ready for easy satellite mode config. This means that network
shares had to be added on their web config, and it made them crawl-
except for moOde, which just died after I added my NFS share.

There are other, fun configuration issues. For example, on Volumio MPD
set to hardware volume mixer, but Spotify Connect is still on softvol,
so setting the volume on MPD sets a baseline for Spotify, but not the
other way around.

However, if the goal is simply local playback:

-   Raspberry Pi OS Lite
-   MPD
-   and either an external DAC (in my case, the Topping MX3) or an I2S
    hat

gives you a rock-solid playback system, that is once setup, will
probably run forever. In case you want to turn MPD into a DLNA client,
there's a beautiful little software, called upmpdcli[^28] that can do
that. It worked quite nice.

This was my MPD config with the Topping:

`/etc/mpd.conf`

``` apache
music_directory         "/path/to/music"
database                "/var/lib/mpd/database"
playlist_directory      "/var/lib/mpd/playlists"
log_file                "syslog"
pid_file                "/run/mpd/pid"
state_file              "/var/lib/mpd/state"
sticker_file            "/var/lib/mpd/sticker.sql"
user                    "mpd"
group                   "audio"
bind_to_address         "0.0.0.0"
log_level               "error"
input {
        plugin          "curl"
}
decoder {
        plugin          "hybrid_dsd"
        enabled         "no"
}
decoder {
        plugin          "wildmidi"
        enabled         "no"
}
audio_output {
        type            "alsa"
        name            "MX3"
        device          "hw:CARD=MX3,DEV=0"
        mixer_type      "hardware"
        mixer_device    "hw:CARD=MX3"
        mixer_control   "PCM"
}
filesystem_charset      "UTF-8"
```

## Addendum #2: Spotify Connect with raspotify

If you want to stream: raspotify[^29] works fine for Spotify Connect,
but there's no telling, how long, given it's a reverse-engineered,
unofficial solution.

`/etc/raspotify/conf`

``` apache
LIBRESPOT_AUTOPLAY=
LIBRESPOT_DISABLE_AUDIO_CACHE=
LIBRESPOT_DISABLE_DISCOVERY=
LIBRESPOT_BITRATE="320"
LIBRESPOT_FORMAT="S16"
LIBRESPOT_SAMPLE_RATE="44.1kHz"
LIBRESPOT_DEVICE_TYPE="speaker"
LIBRESPOT_DEVICE="hw:CARD=MX3,DEV=0"
LIBRESPOT_BACKEND="alsa"
LIBRESPOT_MIXER="alsa"
LIBRESPOT_ALSA_MIXER_DEVICE="hw:CARD=MX3"
LIBRESPOT_ALSA_MIXER_CONTROL="PCM"
LIBRESPOT_USERNAME="$SPOTIFY_USER"
LIBRESPOT_PASSWORD="$SPOTIFY_PASSWORD"
LIBRESPOT_INITIAL_VOLUME="50"
LIBRESPOT_VOLUME_CTRL="linear"
LIBRESPOT_ONEVENT=""
TMPDIR=/tmp
```

## Addendum #3: Using the Topping MX3 as DAC or pre-amplifier

Do not believe Reddit experts[^30]: yes, you can use a Topping MX3 both
as pre-amp and for line-in level, but keep this in mind:

-   for line-in you **must** set the volume to maximum `-10dB` or `56`
    because anything higher is above line level[^31] and will overdrive
    the input
-   as far as I understand `0 db` or `76` it meant for when one connects
    it directly to a power amplifier

To change between level and dB display, press Mute then Mode on the
remote.

## Addendum #4: failed attempts

### Kodi[^32] on Raspberry Pi 3 {#video-and-audio-kodi33-on-raspberry-pi-3}

I have two Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Rev 1.2 -s. These things supposed to
have both h264 and h265 hardware decoders, but as it turns out, this got
messed up because some the decoders are closed source. This means no
Kodi beyond 18 if hardware acceleration is needed for HEVC (aka
x265).[^33].

This wasn't my only problem: Kodi turned out to be utterly unusable with
my music collection, mainly because there is no folders/file view. It
was slow and miserable to use with Kore, on the web, on the TV,
basically in any way.

There is a Spotify Connect addon that worked though, but nothing for
Tidal.

### Jellyfin server[^34] with Jellyfin app on Chromecast {#audio-and-video-jellyfin-server35-with-jellyfin-app-on-chromecast}

Everyone loves raving about Jellyfin, but they all forget one thing: it
loves to transcode. My ~~low powered~~ energy efficient server(s) don't,
and because of the aforementioned lack of DivX support in Google TV[^35]
no native playback is possible for those kind of files without
transcoding, meaning this setup is a no-go.

### Chromecast with Google TV with USB-C hub and the Topping MX3 as external DAC

One of the hacks I tried was to connect the Chromecast with Google TV to
a USB-C hub that had PD passthrough charging and an external DAC.
Unfortunately Android 12 doesn't want you to do that[^36][^37] and so it
sometimes breaks rather randomly.

While there's MPD server[^38] app for the Google TV that works
flawlessly in satellite mode[^39], because of HDMI CEC it kept turning
the TV when the music started playing.

There's also no working MPD client for the TV, so while it was playing
music, there was no way of stopping it from the Chromecast.

### An Android tablet with USB-C hub and an external DAC

I learned it the fun way that Spotify Connect only works for the very
account you log in with on the tablet - it's not like the Chromecast or
librespot, where anyone on the network could do it, so this was dropped
as well.

[^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

[^2]: https://developers.google.com/cast/docs/media

[^3]: https://www.hifiengine.com/manual_library/panasonic/sa-ak18.shtml

[^4]: https://www.tpdz.net/productinfo/398300.html

[^5]: https://www.musicpd.org/

[^6]: https://dtcooper.github.io/raspotify/

[^7]: https://www.dali-speakers.com/en/products/oberon/oberon-5

[^8]: https://store.google.com/gb/product/chromecast_google_tv?hl=en-GB

[^9]: https://antonioforcionenaim.bandcamp.com/track/landmark

[^10]: https://iiwireviews.com/category/reviews/snake-oil/

[^11]: https://www.androidbrick.com

[^12]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRxYNbgHpxQ

[^13]: https://www.youtube.com/@eprojectEllie

[^14]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73_CiAYX00k

[^15]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwYaL-QlCKQ

[^16]: https://nadelectronics.com/product/c-316bee-v2-stereo-integrated-amplifier/

[^17]: https://indieweb.org/2023/Nuremberg/write

[^18]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Smell_of_Rain

[^19]: https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=297771

[^20]: https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot

[^21]: https://support.google.com/chromecast/chromecastaudio?visit_id=638341182298633413-569899589&hl=en-GB&rd=1#topic=6279364

[^22]: https://wiimhome.com/wiimpro/overview

[^23]: https://xdaforums.com/t/app-7-0-v4-2-1-bubbleupnp-upnp-dlna-chromecast-control-point-and-renderer.1118891/

[^24]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/ReadyMedia

[^25]: https://volumio.com/en/

[^26]: https://moodeaudio.org/

[^27]: https://github.com/rern/rAudio

[^28]: https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/upmpdcli/

[^29]: https://dtcooper.github.io/raspotify/

[^30]: https://www.reddit.com/r/audiophile/comments/jnav7y/honest_question_can_you_use_a_topping_mx3_as_a/

[^31]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_level

[^32]: https://kodi.tv/

[^33]: https://wiki.libreelec.tv/hardware/raspberry-pi

[^34]: https://jellyfin.org/

[^35]: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/clients/codec-support/

[^36]: https://piunikaweb.com/2022/11/25/usb-audio-routing-on-chromecast-not-working-after-android-12/

[^37]: https://www.googlenestcommunity.com/t5/Chromecast/USB-Audio-routing-broken-after-Android-12-update/m-p/263147

[^38]: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.musicpd/

[^39]: https://mpd.readthedocs.io/en/stable/user.html#satellite