Thanks for the tremendous instructions Dennis!



I wanted to share a couple of images from my project. I'm running the Pro-ject T1 turntable in a Walnut finish. The raspberry Pi & the components are double-sided taped to the underside of the turntable so it looks like a regular record player. The T1 has three little legs and all of the components are short enough to fit under nicely.



I elected to use the Pi Zero W (Wireless) as it's cheaper & smaller for this project. I was concerned that the Pi Zero would be to slow for this application but I'm happy to report that MP3 encoding (Darkice) uses ~30% of the CPU during encoding and the streaming (icecast) appears to use minimal CPU.



I had to adjust the cron job from a 10 second sleep to a 15 second sleep otherwise darkice wouldn't start up properly on the slower Pi Zero hardware which others in this discussion forum reported the same finding.



Initally, I purchased the Digitnow USB Audio Capture Grabber from amazon to save a few bucks but the sound quality was very tinny and significantly lacked bass. I'm not a bass head but the audio quality was no acceptable. I did boost the bass all the way up in Sonos using the Sonos digital EQ and it sounded okay but it's a pain to toggle the Sonos digital EQ to full bass versus regular bass depending if I'm listening to the turntable or regular music on Sonos from a digital source (Apple music).



I just switched to the Behringer UFO202 (running with the switch on PHONO) and it makes a world of difference in terms of the sound quality being outputted to Sonos; vinyl sounds great over Sonos now. The Digitnow USB Audio Capture Grabber is getting returned to amazon ASAP!



I was too lazy to hookup a monitor and keyboard up to configure the Pi Zero W so I went with a headless installation running Raspberry Pi OS Lite; surprising the headless setup was a piece of cake.I figured with the slower Pi Zero W processor, the "lite" OS was a better choice for me.



I ended up combining these instructions from Dennis with the following instructions from github: https://github.com/basdp/USB-Turntables-to-Sonos-with-RPi to create a softvol device to boost the audio way up from the turntable. Otherwise the turntable output was way too low and again I was too lazy & cheap to purchase a physical device to boost the audio volume if it can all be done via software.



In my /etc/asound.conf, I'm running with a max_db of 90 and in my alsamixer -c 1, I'm with a boost of 86.0 db.



The below command is wonderful to test the boost level to ensure the audio isn't exceeding constantly hitting/exceeding 99% and getting clipped / distorted. In the below command, dmic_sv is the name of my softvol device and you can sub it out with plughw:1,0 that jive with Dennis' instructions.



arecord -D dmic_sv -r 44100 -f S16_LE -c 2 --vumeter=stereo /dev/null



Please note when you're running arecord, you need to kill darkice as they can't run concurrently.



Lastly, the Sonos Desktop app is no longer required to create the custom stream in Sonos; again I was lazy and did it directly in the Sonos iPhone app; I imagine Sonos added support for this over the last year or so.



In summary, if you do care about audio quality and you're following these instructions for a turntable, my advise would be to skips the cheap USB Audio Capture Card devices on amazon and get the Behringer UFO202; the UFO202 doesn't break the bank and for an extra $25 it's so worth it!



I'm happy to answer any questions.



cheers,

Dave.



