[thecubasekid]

Hi Folks,

i am looking for some advice / recommendations.

i am looking to get an android TV box for use in my music room. i plan to run it headless with no TV screen and will use Yatse on my tablet to control. I plan to hook it up via optical to a NAD home theater amp, and possibly in the future to my dac instead that then connects to pre / power amps.

i am looking for a cheap android box that will perform well for music and boot reasonably quickly. (i am happy to install Linux in place of android if this will give better results as long as it has similar boot up time to android)

anyone got a similar set up or anyone using kodi predominantly for music who could comment?

Thanks!!

[DarrenHill]

Thread moved to hardware

[Stereodude]

How big is your music library and where is the music stored / how does the player access it?

At first glance without more information I'd say Rpi3 with a SPDIF board running LibreELEC.

[Soli]

Go with one of the various MPD based distros. Volumio is known to work fairly well. Kodi IMHO is far from ideal when it comes to pure music duties.

[thecubasekid]

Thanks for the replies, my music collection is around 300gb - about 60% is Mp3 @320kbps, the remainder is mostly flac, some 24bit mp3 (and a few 24/96 wav - these are my own recordings made in cubase / nuendo so no one else listens to them!) . All is stored on my PC and will be connected via Ethernet, and my library is in mysql on my PC.

my reason for wanting to use Kodi for my music is i like the easy to use (and easy on the eye) interface in both Kodi and Yatse, and that my wife can use it, along with Yatse (i have old atv1 with old openelec running headless in the lounge for music and she (and my young children) can use that ok with Yatse). I configured Aeon Nox Silvo just for music with simple menus and art and she actually uses it in the kitchen on a tablet connected to my arcam rCube over Bluetooth, taking it from my pc over wifi.) - they are the only bits of technology i have been able to show her she has any interest in. It took me a long time to get there!

if she can use the system in the music room easily without learning curve she is less likely to complain about chunky amps and speakers lol

if i get good solution in the music room i will probably duplicate in the lounge replacing the atv1 so all can share same library running krypton and contribute to play count / top 100 etc globally.

i suppose i am also harking after the old days where i had set my original xbox to send stereo out of all speakers in my old home cinema amp. even with the lossy protocols it was outstanding, and i preferred how it sounded even compared to my old dedicated system with Cambridge audio sacd and rotel pre-power amps monoblocked, placebo maybe but i just loved how it filled the room...

[Stereodude]

So, RPi3 will work well for what you want.  I've done what you're trying to do with the RPi3 for audio only with Kodi controlled by Yatse.  One with HDMI audio and another with SPDIF.

Get a HiFi Digi+ from eBay to the RPi3 and you'll have your SPDIF output.  It's not very hard to make it work under LibreElec.

[thecubasekid]

Thanks will look in to it!