Hello all, have been lurking for a while and would love some help. Looking to turn a Quad 22 box into fully digital Roon endpoint and phono input!
Backstory
Currently in the process of rebuilding a couple of Quad Monoblock's and going back to basics as the units had failed when a previous owner 'upgraded' to EL34s. The Quad 22 was also in a very sorry state and instead of going analogue, want to turn this into Quad on the Outside, Raspberry HiFi running Roon on the inside.
Project Scope
My ecosystem is Roon and Tidal, and love the work @iancanada has done, where it looks like the STATIONPI PRO Raspberry Pi and HAT Boards Adapter Station will fit perfectly into the Quad 22 box. Want to try and keep the front panel as close to the original layout and am thinking:
Would greatly appreciate thoughts or recommendations on how to best:
Malcolm
Backstory
Currently in the process of rebuilding a couple of Quad Monoblock's and going back to basics as the units had failed when a previous owner 'upgraded' to EL34s. The Quad 22 was also in a very sorry state and instead of going analogue, want to turn this into Quad on the Outside, Raspberry HiFi running Roon on the inside.
Project Scope
My ecosystem is Roon and Tidal, and love the work @iancanada has done, where it looks like the STATIONPI PRO Raspberry Pi and HAT Boards Adapter Station will fit perfectly into the Quad 22 box. Want to try and keep the front panel as close to the original layout and am thinking:
- Original Volume Control and Balance: Install Digital Volume Control and forget aboyt the balance.
- Stereo/Mono Switches: Turn these into unit On/OFF. Yes have an aluminum CnC guys and engraver lined up.
- Inputs Selectors: Use Position 1 and 2 on the input selector for DAC and Phone Input, which leaves me 2 spare.
- Tone Controls: Remove and replace with round digital display for DAC info.
Would greatly appreciate thoughts or recommendations on how to best:
- Phono: Get a quality phono input into the system and switching to the outputs to feed the Quad Monos?
- Digital Volume: Recommended DAC that support 24/192 and can to the volume thing!
- Displays: Any alternate ideas for the 4 round tone control cut outs, anyway of getting 4 displays running off a single Ropieee xl (I suspect not)
- PSU: Picking that the Ultra Capacitor Conditioner Board for Raspberry Pi will do the job, but open to suggestions.
Malcolm
Attachments
Probably not a good idea. RPi are significant radiated and conducted EMI/RFI sources that can interfere with the clean operation of a connected or nearby dac. You might want to take a look at all the stuff Iancanada sells with suffex 'pi' added to the end of the name. The majority of it is to fix all the problems trying to use RPi to make hat-style streaming endpoints, etc. IMHO its probably not the smartest nor necessarily the low-cost way to go. Someone can spend a lot of money fighting RPi problems and still not get great results. If all you need is streaming and you can limit what needs to go into the dac to USB, its possible to use RPi is an asynchronous USB host, provide it is well separated and shielded from the dac. Putting them both together in a small box is may not make that job so simple.