When the news came out that the Cast family was going to have the “Audio” vinyl-shaped Chromecast, as a music lover I immediately wanted to purchase one to make my experience much smarter. Since throwing money at the screen apparently didn’t make the trick, I started to figure out what my setup would become.

Once upon a time.

Press PLAY on tape.

I currently own a quite old Sony MCH-BX2 HiFi system, fully featured with a — broken — 3-slot CD reader, the most useless 2-slot tape reader, an analogic radio and two good speakers (6 ohm). Since the beast is much larger than an ATX case, attaching my future Chromecast Audio to it wouldn’t have made it smaller nor nicer: it would have just added a whole new layer of cables to my already messed-up shelf (hello blue Android).

Basically, I would have used my stereo just as an amplifier. Not that smart after all, right?

So why not getting rid of the HiFi body while still using the same speakers? Turns out I need an amplifier for that.

The search for a compact amplifier.

Searching for audio amplifiers on Amazon resulted in a quite nice outcome: a very small audio amplifier board (less than 11€ or 9£) with minimum specs:

2 channels (15W each)

3.5mm AUX input

volume handle

a nice blue LED

damn cheap

The thing is 50mm for each side — tops — so it made the perfect candidate to replace my obsolete system.

All I needed was some kind of box to put it into in order to avoid false contacts (and possibly fires, LOL).

Who said “fire”?

So there is this little 3D printer at work that nobody ever uses, and it feels lonely and unimportant… Let’s fix this.