I’m looking at getting some sounds for my shed. I’ve got a pair of old speakers from an old Sony “midi” hi-fi and was looking to get a 2nd hand amp to power them. Planning to plug in a raspberry pi (with one of those HiFiBerry DAC hats) to the amp.

The alternative is one of those portable soundbar things, but I have these speakers already, and several Raspberry Pis to make use of, and can’t help but be dubious about the claims of speakers barely the size of my fist to let me feel the bass or fill the room with 20w of sound.

Realistically however, it wouldn’t be a good idea to be able to feel the bass in my shed.

Not sure what power output the speakers have either. The hifi unit is long gone can’t remember what it was other than a Sony. Anyone have any pointers to what amp might work for the speakers? Sorry bit of a longshot I guess.

I have an old hifi and a cable to plug in to my phone. Would that not be easier than wiring in a pi?

Also unless you are going for ground shaking bass, will any old amp not do the job?

These little (and they really are fag-packet small!) amps work great…

…I use one at work between my Mac and a pair of Wharfedale 220 speakers.

Why the ruddy hell don’t Amazon links work anymore!?

Cheaper on eBay anyway! 🙂

https://tinyurl.com/sdmeanva

I’ve gone ghetto and (edit, beaten to the punch) _also_ rigged up one of these cheap t-amps in my garage, to run two old hifi speakers. Use a little bluetooth to 3.5mm dongle most of the time to play the audio from my phone. All in cost about 30 quid. Nice and loud, hasn’t broken after (checks amazon order emails) 8 years of a couple of hours a week.

The Pirate Audio hats for Pi are another option though, I think one of them can drive speakers directly?

I would have thought that any reasonable amp would power a pair of speakers from an old midi-system.

Those kind of systems were never massively powerful, so I doubt the speakers would be particularly hard to drive.

Depending on your budget, I’d just trawl ebay for the usual suspects: NAD, Rotel, Yamaha, Technics, Cambridge Audio, Sony, Marantz etc.

Also unless you are going for ground shaking bass, will any old amp not do the job?

Not sure tbh! I don’t want anything too big and loud, so the 20yo Cambridge Audio amp + Mordaunt Short speakers are staying in the loft 🙂

Have forgotten what little I used to vaguely know about amps/speakers/watts etc.

@the-muffin-man thanks they look worth looking into

i have a pi-zero, hifiberry DAC, old separates amp and speaker. connectivity through spotify. Sound is sooo much better than even a bluetooth receiver plugged in via RCA.

Those I’ll old midi speakers could be pretty basic. Is a Raspberry pi cheaper than a pair of Edifice 1280s?

I’m sorry, but Nobsound?

I already have the Pi/DAC otherwise sitting unused, and speakers. Just need an amp to power them.
Willing to risk £25-£30 on one of those amps suggested up there, although the “Nobsound” brand name errrrm… doesn’t really grab me.

Leaning toward that Lepy amp superdan suggested.

I’ve got one of those Nobsound amps in my car.

2 things you need to know, 1 the sound quality isn’t amazing, if streaming from a phone then download the normalizer app to at least EQ it properly.

2 The reason the sound isn’t great is they’re of a type that doesn’t “amplify”, they just take the input and scale it from OV to -/+ the power voltage. As a result powering it from 12V is quiet, powering it from 24V is 4x more powerful (so the one in my car is powered via a 12v to 24v converter). So do get a 24V power supply for it (a 19V+ laptop power supply is probably fine), and you have t pull it apart to solder some leads onto the board unless you’ve got the right connector.

The flipside to that is efficiency, the reason the big amp in your living room gets hot is that it’s actually doing very inefficient work to amplify the signal.

They’re also half that price (or less) on ebay or direct from china.

They do some bigger ones, and ones with valves in. Apparently, they’re all the same circuit, just with different cases and pretty looking but redundant valves.

This sounds really good and more than enough oomph for a shed.

Some old Gale 3010s, a Lepy digital amp and 3.5mm jack to 2xRCA lead.

You can do it for less than £30.

The £30 didn’t include the speakers…but you have them so all id=s well.

Thanks for the amp suggestions. Here’s the “finished” thing, all working nicely together. Turns out they were Philips speakers not Sony.

Short description if you’re interested:
Existing hardware consists of a Raspberry Pi 2b (64gb MicroSD) wearing a HiFiBerry DAC+ audio hat with a TSOP382 IR receiver soldered directly to it. Two old Philips speakers (6ohm IIRC). An old DION TV remote control. No network connectiopn of any kind.

Software on the PI is latest Raspberry Pi OS lite. It isn’t connected to the network so music collection is stored on MicroSD card alongside OS. MPD outputs music to the DAC+ hat. MPC controls MPD. IREXEC sends commands either directly to MPC or to MPC via a BASH script written to add functionality to provide user feedback when controls are toggled such as random on/off consume on/off. When controls are toggled, the script pauses playtback and SOX is used to play white/pink noise to indicate on, and a pure sine tone to indicate off. LIRC processes IR codes received from the DION remote control and sends them to IREXEC. Plan to create playlists which can be selected by pressing the numeric buttons. Currently pressing 1 restores the playlist (when consume is on, each song played is removed from playlist) of all available music. Poweroff button shuts the system down. At the moment favoured usage is to play songs on random and if it plays something from an album I particularly like I can swith random off and listen to the whole album. Pressing up/down on remote goes to next/prev song, left+right seeks backwords/forwards 1s.

The only thing is there’s no way of knowing what is playing unless you already know. I’m doubtful a display hat would work alongside the hifiberry DAC+ AND the IR receiver (soldered to the DAC+ board) due to GPIO conflicts. The IR is already soldered to non-std pins because of conflicts with the DAC+ (not a problem just needs a line saying which pin to use in /boot/config.txt). Might consider a Pi Zero with a display, and network cable to communicate song data to display, but then that would use yet another power supply. In some ways it quite nice not knowing what is playing as sometimes I will pre-judge what I’m listening to rather than just letting it play and finding out.

Nice! Using a Pi is always the best option 🤣 if you did want to network it, you have loads of options, could run it headless as a Plex or Airplay client controlled from your phone (or other devices)

I’ve used old PC ATX PSUs before for Pi projects, you can get a cheap breakout board they plug into to make them work & give you 5v/12v etc, that way everything can run off just one PSU/plug

Using a Pi is always the best option 🤣

Exactly!

Except a) when setting it all up takes one hundred times longer than anticipated and you’re cursing yourself for the choices made, and b) a year or two down the line and you’ve forgotten how it all works and/or software updates break it all!

However currently feeling satisfied 🙂

Interesting about the PC PSU. If it could power the amp as well, that would be cool.

Interesting about the PC PSU. If it could power the amp as well, that would be cool.

yes, it could do that (think that amp is 12v?)
I got some boards like this (not specifically this seller) direct from China, only paid a couple of quid each as I got a few. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/283960251195
Although if I were buying again I’d probably get this one as it’s a lot more compact (don’t remember seeing them at the time though)
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/193460466709
(Just be aware that you’d want to connect the amp to 12v & ground, not 12v & -12v as that’d probably kill it!! Not really sure what the -12v terminal is about or why you’d use it, guess it’s a feature of the ATX PSUs though!)

ATX PSUs are pretty easy to scrounge, used lots in Pi projects & never paid for one yet 🤣

I’m still using this setup – the headless Raspberry Pi with no network connection with MPD playing MP3s stored on SD card. An IR remote control (from some old TV long dead) to control, and the Lepy amp to power speakers. Works very nicely.

Except…. every so often I’ll turn it on and it won’t play any music. The remote control is setup to toggle between play/paused when the OK button is pressed. Nothing happens. I’d also setup another button to toggle shuffle on/off and another to toggle consume on/off and these also played a short blast of brown noise when on, or a sine wave when off to provide user feedback – these still worked so I assumed it was just a minor fault with the OK button of the remote control.

It’s happened a couple of times now. I think the first time I just reinstalled the whole system. The 2nd time I brought it indoors and SSH’d in and manually recreated the playlist, and also set a button on the remote control to re-create the playlist. Everything worked again and I consequentially forgot all about it.

This time, as I was convinced the OK button was faulty, I brought the Pi in and reassigned a different key on the remote control to toggle play/paused, but it I ended up suspecting that key was faulty too!. Pried the remote apart to inspect it but there was literally nothing to see wrong with it. Brought it back in today and SSH’d in again.

Eventually realized the playlist had gone again, but why!? So manually recreated the playlist and everything was working again.

Then it dawned on me. Consume mode takes songs off the playlist after it plays them. It had been through the entire playlist of 4000+ tracks. I set it to consume mode so I don’t listen to the same track repeatedly.

Everything had been working as I’d intended all along.. except my brain 🤦🍓🤦🍓🤦🍓

The new, cheap class D amps are surprisingly good in a shed (bathroom) system. I have something like one of the above sat in the bathroom cupboard with an Alexa plugged into it and some boat/waterproof speakers in the ceiling. OK for radio while showering.

My #1 child has a pair of Mission stand speakers, stands, some class D amp with Bluetooth and commented that it was not as loud as a friend’s Bluetooth speaker.

I’m still pleasantly surprised at the volume and quality possible from an apple HiFi and a Bose dock speaker. Even compared with FO HiFi speakers (kef reference, monitor audio gold) and high power modern amps (Denon, Yamaha).

Sure, the extremes are very different. But for regular listening? Not wildly apart.

OP my reference would be to get a class D amp and plug an mp3 player/phone/Pi into it. But I like big speakers. Though for 🤷🏻‍♂️ what reason I still have good memories of a friend’s Bose system.

Get a second hand kenwood or pioneer or similar amp?

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/115588077903?hash=item1ae996194f%3Ag%3A3REAAOSwisFjYPsS&amdata=enc%3AAQAHAAAA4IB%2FwFlI49CCRKtLbCTr7mWq7Xum18jbtDb7tvKF0wbLW%2B1sMljY%2FMwwUHcRkMmFiqu%2Bl%2FV7EUi1gsjoAdD2iEEawqMBWG8JNdY08llwciB0IIZLHJUuVcwROzEVxbCM3LE6AkgkXX%2BrF62hZ1fPPpSawYkEPZuS6NlJsyNbXs%2FHC3tQ36VenIRim1OslI4qVUIXC9Kt%2FMp%2BCI7UK7GvFpOcmTR7edpkKTGzg3ZhLzTkFcMvL4vpiR7D9TARDiuqcVYHM71aMZ4dldVmcaqnD7ola8LfrORBUn2Sq7mqwr9u%7Ctkp%3ABk9SR8qxz96LYQ&LH_BIN=1