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I build a Raspberry Pi Player for my system. Parts I ordered and received as below:

Raspberry Pi Zero,

1 to 2 USB hub,

TERADAK WM8805 I2S to SPDIF board,

linear power supply.

USB Wi-Fi- dongle.

The I2S to Spdif from TERADAK looks good and it cost around 30 usd. I order from ebay with free shipping, and it arrived around 2 weeks.

I need to purchase suitable casing for this project. Since most casing are aluminium , I can’t use Pi Zero W, because the casing will form a faraday cage to shield all RF wave . Signal from the onboard Wi-fi will not be able to transmit out from the casing, thats why I bought USB hub and use an external USB Wi-Fi dongle instead.

After compared several type of MPD players for a long while, I found that Moode Audio are most suitable for my project here. Sound quality are very good. I try to tweak the config.txt to get better sound quality. I add some line in boot/config.txt as below:

force_turbo=1
avoid_pwm_pll=1
arm_freq=700
sdram_freq=300
core_freq=200
gpu_freq=200
over_voltage=-4
over_voltage_sdram=-4
gpu_mem=16

sudo nano /lib/systemd/system/mpd.service

CPUSchedulingPolicy=fifo
CPUSchedulingPriority=80
Nice=-15

Obviously, some under-clock process here, but it works just fine in my Raspberry Pi Zero.

In-fact, I build one for my friend , and another one for myself. Linear power supply is the key for good sound. I used dual separate linear regulator, and a small transformer as main power. One section of regulated power feed into Raspberry Pi and another section of regulator connected to TERADAK I2S to SPDIF board. The board has built-in jumpers to choose either shared power from Raspberry Pi or individual power supply.

Most of my DIY equipments has no LED indicators, because I hate those annoying lights in my dim room. Thats why you virtually can’t find any LED indicator in all my projects.

I upload video of my build here: