Recommend a high quality Bluetooth receiver board?

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Windcrest77

Windcrest77

Member
Joined 2019
#1
Hi, I want to add a Bluetooth receiver board to an old Onkyo amplifier that I use in my basement workshop. I'm looking for a PCB board that receives Bluetooth and has a line out and runs off DC 5 to 12 volts, split rail or single power. It should be near-audiophile quality, not looking for a toy. I have plenty of space inside the chassis for a board up to 3 inches square. I will internally re-wire the Aux input source to this board. Any recommendations would be great!
 
#2
IIUC there are no audiophile quality Bluetooth boards because Bluetooth audio is always lossy compressed. The best you could probably do is to find a Bluetooth board with I2S output. At least then you could run the digital I2S output through a good ASRC (which uses a very good reference clock), then through a good dac (using the same reference clock).

Otherwise if you use the dac in the Bluetooth board it will most likely not be very good.

It would be even better if you could run the Bluetooth board from external audio clocks so that no ASRC would be needed. Don't know of any Bluetooth boards offhand that will let you do that, however, and the audio would still be lossy compressed.

For myself, I don't use any digital audio of less than CD quality. I know how to reconstruct CD or better into analog audio quite well, but there is little point in doing that with material that has been lossy compressed. Its already too damaged for me.
 
#4
That module is based on the AS19AP chip series, you'll find these in a lot of Chinese BT modules. I've used these often to build into old amplifiers with good results. They sound amazingly decent imho but they are very tricky regarding grounding and ground related noise. Feeding it from the amplifiers own 5 V rail can be a real challenge for that reason. What I usually do to overcome this is to use a separate 5V smps (the guts of any old phone charger will do) to feed the module. Simply connect the smps in parallel to the mains transformer of your amp, link the 5V to the module, signal l/r and one ground connection to the amplifiers aux input.
 
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#6
There's always raspberry pi 4/5 and the other variations like the zero 2 w and cm4. Some have 3.5mm outputs others you need hate. I would recommend the cm4+nano base board since you can mount the antenna outside on the rear of the receiver.
 
#10
Get yourself a Google Chrome Cast with audio output. You my still find some on e-bay. It is small, runs from 5V send any stream you please over your network from any app or device that has a cast function, nothing to solder all in one solution - then be happy.
 
#14
I did something similar with an old amp I had lying around. I went with a Bluetooth PCB board I found online that worked really well for integrating Bluetooth into the system. It had a solid line-out, ran off 5V, and didn’t sacrifice sound quality—definitely not a toy! The setup was super easy to wire in, and the sound quality was impressive for the price.I had the same idea as you—keeping it near-audiophile quality—and this board really delivered. If you want something with good performance and minimal hassle, I’d recommend checking out some of the options in that category.
 
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