Possible to make a bluetooth speaker with Pi?

[Martin Frezman]

Suppose I have a Pi3 (with the built-in bluetooth) and a pair of nice (and expensive) old stereo speakers that I'd like to use. Can I easily cobble together the equivalent of those fancy bluetooth speakers you now see in stores?

[tpylkko]

In theory, yes. However, you will most likely not be satisfied with the sound quality of it. Especially if you use the analog output. Plus you can make something way more interesting and functional with basically the same effort. Like a sound server that can be contolled with a phone or any computer that can play music from a cloud or stream and receive music from a phone over wifi so that the audio is lossless.

[Douglas6]

I've done exactly that, but I'm using a pair of powered speakers. For regular (passive) speakers, you'll also need an amplifier. And, as tpylkko mentions, you'll probably want a USB sound card.

For streaming music from the net, you don't want to use both onboard Bluetooth and WiFi. And since most audio on the net is mp3 compressed, it won't be lossless.

[tpylkko]

All of this can be resolved by not using bluetooth at all. Furthermore, you save alot of battery by using your phone to only control the pi and not have it send data over bluetooth all the time. I say this because it appears that many people don't realize this. Yet, if someone so wished, you can esily make only a simple bluetooth sink of your pi. It just seems a bit of a waste. Especially if you aim to save money over a store bought bt speaker. In addition to the pi you need an amplifier, dac and speakers. Some manufacturers have add-on boards that combine a dac with an amplifier. Iqaudio for example. But the costs will likely exceed 100€.

My media server has music in flac and so called high resolution formats. I can easily send them over wifi to the pi. My phone has some albums in flac and I can likewise send them over. There are three lossless internet radios channels I listen to on my pi also.

Much music on the net is indeed compressed but I don't think many services use mp3 though.

[Martin Frezman]

I don't have a phone.

[tpylkko]

Good