[jeromenerf]

I have the same kind of setup than the parent comment (rpi2 and hifiberry dac, hooked to a marantz amp that also does phono).

It runs on raspbian and is USB powered and Ethernet networked by the close Apple timecapsule NAS / wifi AP. It then provides pulseaudio remote, shairport and mpd services.

I have not witnessed stutter but with buffering comes some kind of lag indeed. I strimmed down the basic install, by removing packages, disabling services and devices, in order to reduce power consumption and have the rpi to work out of the timecapsule USB.

My main takeaways:

1. The system has been stable for years and sounds great. I use it on the weekends mostly.

2. The DAC is great, because the built in audio is really terrible.

3. Spotify over Airport quality is not on par with pulseaudio, nor with playing flac through mpd. I have not found great mobile mpd client. Convenience wins.

4. It is strangely difficult to have pulseaudio running headless.

[m_t]

I'm currently building a Spotify Connect box based on Raspberry Pi 0W.

Do you have any information on what you could strip down from the basic Raspbian to get the best performance / power consumption?

[jeromenerf]

Here is the snippet from my notes. I am not sure it applies to the rpi0w:

Raspbian seems OK.

Regarding the post-install config, mostly about deactivating stuff to lower the power consumption:

# /boot/config.txt [all] # should disable wifi, bluetooth and hdmi at boot time, lowering power consumption dtoverlay=disable-wifi dtoverlay=disable-bt hdmi_blanking=2 #dtoverlay=vc4-fkms-v3d dtoverlay=hifiberry-dacplus

# builtin audio must be deactivated #dtparam=audio=on Also, HDMI deactivation could live in another place, so add the following to /etc/rc.local :

# Disable HDMI /usr/bin/tvservice -o Then, some packages should be installed:

sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade

sudo apt-get pulseaudio pulsemixer pamix shairport pulseaudio-module-raop pulseaudio-module-zeroconf cmus mpd mpc

[m_t]

Thanks for the follow up. I'll try those and see if I can get some performance improvement.

[jeromenerf]

From there, I have not needed to apply more hacks on top. It works just fine.