TheMarlin wrote: ↑Sun Jun 16, 2019 12:00 pm
Is there a DAC in the Pi package, or does it need to go into a DAC?
I've gone the onboard DAC route. There are several DAC boards you can get. I've tried hifiberry, IQAudio and Justboom. There really isn't a lot between them but I've kept coming back to Hifiberry. If you search for Raspberry Pi DAC boards, you will find a whole pile of them. The one I fancy trying but never got round to is the Durio Sound one (dual mono configuration) and I'd really like to try separating the power supply for the Pi from the power supply for the Dac.
But all you do is put your DAC HAT on your Pi (Hat = "Hardware Attached on top). Flash an SD card with an OS of choice (Moode and Volumio are popular choices and plug in a power supply.
The harder bits are finding a way of attaching to a network (wired or wireless) and to an audio source (locally attached, network attached or a streaming service) and deciding how you will control it. Mostly you have a web site running on the Pi which you need to browse to on your local network, which means you need to know a bit about how networks work, but not that much.
You can attach a screen mouse and keyboard via HDMI and USB and control it that way. You will see that there are pi based streaming devices you can build or buy.
There are a number of threads here (and elsewhere) done by 'newbies' which take you through a build step by step.
Here's some food for thought
https://www.hifiberry.com/
http://iqaudio.co.uk/
https://www.justboom.co/
https://volumio.org/
https://moodeaudio.org/