Hi everyone. I’ve read through quite a few of the posts here, and I can see that I can look forward to a lot of good advice. (I’m going to need it.)
First of all, I am not an audiophile. (I had to Google it to see if the last part sounds like “file” or “feel”!) I have about 350 CDs, but we haven’t listened to more than a dozen of them (at Christmas time, on a cheap under-cabinet CD player in the kitchen) in years. (And years, and years…)
Several years ago, I digitized all my VHS and DVD movies, and watch them using Plex on a Raspberry Pi, streamed to our Roku. It works very well, and I would like to do the same thing with our CDs.
I know that I can use Plex to stream digitized audio files to the TV (I’ve tested it), and the sound is good enough for us. But the Plex interface is horrendous for audio, especially once I have 350 albums to scroll through. So, I want to find something better. Hopefully much better.
I’ve researched online, and Volumio seems to be very highly regarded, so I thought I’d start here.
My proposed setup will be:
- Raspberry Pi4 2GB
- DAC/AMP HAT (unpurchased, brand TBD)
- a couple of cheap speakers
Everything will be hardwired together. I won’t be using wireless at all. Data path is: hard drive → Raspberry Pi file server → router (in bonus room) → access point (in living room) → Raspberry Pi Volumio server → DAC/AMP HAT → speakers. From the HAT to the speakers will be speaker wire (obviously), and from the drive to the file server is USB. Other than that, all the connections are CAT6 Ethernet cable.
I haven’t purchased the RPi or HAT yet, because if I can’t find an interface I like better than Plex, I’ll just use what I have. And I figured I’d get a DAC/AMP combination HAT so that I could go directly from this setup to my speakers, without having to go through a separate amp. Like I said, my standards on audio quality is pretty low. I’m doing this for convenience. I hope that doesn’t offend anyone here. 
I chose this setup as the simplest I could come up with, in order to actually listen to all those CDs.
If anyone sees a problem with what I’m thinking about doing, I would welcome any suggestions and advice.