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The enbloggening.

Multi-room audio with the HiFiBerry DAC+ Pro and Volumio

The old amplifier's faceplate.

After my kitchen stereo project, I’d been thinking about the next stage in my multi-room, RaspberryPi-based audio setup: The Living Room! I had, in a box, unused for probably ten years, an old NAD C272 stereo amplifier. A pair of Paradigm Atom bookshelf speakers were gathering dust down in the basement that used to belong […]

HiFiBerry Amp 2, Vintage Koss Speakers and Volumio

I’ve been a Sonos user for probably five years now. Initially, they were something of a marvel of integration and software polish, providing ease of setup and room filling sound for … they are not cheap. Their closed ecosystem was another sour note for me, but I pushed past that in favor of convenience. The […]

USB Overdrive, new life for abandoned hardware

This post is a note of appreciation for Alessandro Levi Montalcini‘s USB Overdrive for macOS. I put off buying this software for a couple of years, making due with sub-rate work-arounds and inadequate stop-gap drivers for a slew of random USB devices that have come and gone: The Xbox 360 controller that refused to work; […]

Syncing Playlists with the Fiio X3 (or X1 or X5)

Awhile back I wrote a review of my portable digital audio player, the Fiio X3 2nd generation (Amazon US, Canada). The summary of that review was that this is a bare bones audio player, with a simple UI, that is beautifully-built with an attention to sonic quality. It sounds fantastic but has a few UI […]