Rory said:
Hi. I have a Logitech Squeezebox Duet which needs to be replaced but they are no longer manufactured. I have it in a closet together with my router, laptop with all my music and an amplifier which is wired to speakers that are installed in my kitchen and living room. In my kitchen, I have a small wireless remote control to switch on or off the Squeezebox Duet and it allows me to select interent radio from all over the world with simple and intutive menus and it also allows me to play my music, recognising my iTunes playlists. It has a small screen and shows album artwork and radio station imagery etc. I have looked at the Sonos and Denon products and all of them seem to be either speakers or amplifiers. I need neither, I just want a good replacement for the Logitech Squeezebox Duet. Any suggestions will be gratefully welcomed.
Although Logitech have now dropped the Squeezebox range, there is still life in the platform. The software - both for the server and for the player - is pretty much all open source. This means that anyone can take it and get it running on suitable hardware and indeed there is quite a strong community of people doing just this sort of thing. Have a look over at the 'slimdevices' forum for information.
I recently made my own player using a Raspberry Pi mini computer and the Wolfson Audio board. The latter simply plugs onto the Pi - no soldering needed. There is some quite widely used free software called Squeezeplug that has been put together by someone who has done all the hard work. All I needed to do was download it, copy it onto an SD card and slot it into the Pi. There is a little bit of setting up via some menus but once that is done you have a very capable player which costs in the region of £60 to put together, including power supply and a wi-fi dongle. The Wolfson card is purported to be of 'audiophile' quality (despite its low cost) with some people saying it is superior to the Squeezebox Touch.
If you aren't confident about trying this, there are people selling pre-built Raspberry Pi-based systems on ebay. I just looked and tonight there is one "[font="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"]
HifiBerry DAC Music Streamer". [/font] This uses a different DAC add-on card - the HifiBerry - which is reputed to be at least as good as the Wolfson. (I was put off by the fact that the HifiBerry does need to be soldered onto the Pi.) The ebay system is going for £110 and would be pretty much a drop in replacement for your Duet player (as would be the DIY system such as mine).
As others have mentioned, the Duet controller is more or less redundant these days if you have a tablet or smartphone as there are apps (iPeng on the iPhone and OrangeSqueeze or SqueezeCommander on Android) that allow you to control all of the Squeezebox devices on your network. However, there is no reason why you can not continue to use the Duet controller if you wish as that will also work with all Squeezeboxes on your network.
Speaking of smart devices, it is possible also to run the tablet/phone itself as a Squeezebox player using the same apps I just mentioned (Android needs an additional one called Squeeze Player to achieve this functionality). Indeed that might be another possible option for you if you have a suitable old device. I am not up to speed on the sort of sound quality you could expect to get from this; it no doubt depends on the specific device.
Along similar lines: since it sounds as if you are running the server on a laptop you could also run a software player on the laptop and use that as your player. In this case you need the "Squeeze Play" software. See
this thread in the slimdevices forum. You would probably need an external DAC for the laptop to get the best quality sound but if you are interested in going along this route, you could initially try hooking directly to the laptop's audio out connections.
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