Looking for Bluethooth to Toslink reciever

Equipment / Electronics / Gear / Accessories Source Gear / Other
1

Christmas is coming and as always, kinda unexpected.

My dad has a nice hifi system (Marantz PM6006 beeing the center piece). Lately he has been listening to music on his ipad a lot (I think ipad 2). So my idea is to give him some sort of bluethooth reciever.
As I am unsure if he is going to use it and despite my “buy once, cry once”-mentality, I would like to keep this arround 50€.

My reason for going Toslink is to not trust some random component with being a DAC and instead have the PM6006 handle that.

My little search brought up the TaoTronics 2in1 reciever/transmitter, remains the question of it beeing good enough.

2

I think you want to find one with at least aptx HD, and here are a few

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3

Well I didn’t notice the Ipad 2 part, that only supports up to bluetooth 2.1 lol. You might also want to use something else if you want good quality audio to come out of that lol

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4

It has to be better than the built in speaker, right?
If this is inconvenient (plugging things in) it will not get used.

So maybe I need to go hunting the somewhat rare Albums he has on his wishlist.

5

It would be better than the speaker, but it may be fairly noticeable vs a cd or something. Do you know the exact ipad model? Also is he streaming something like spotify or is he playing actual files from the ipad

6

Can find out.

Use is mostly browsing youtube, so not that the best material to begin with.

7

Ah, well it should be fine then, but perhaps you may eventually want to upgrade the ipad later on. My original iPad (the thicc boi one) doesn’t even work anymore, so I’m surprised an original iPad 2 is that functional

8

Stuff in our family tends to last forever.

9

I mean I treated mine well too lol, the software was what killed it. Nothing on it is supported on it anymore and it really couldn’t run anything before it died because of the battery. Also right after the charge port just stopped working after the battery took a crap

10

What about a Raspberry Pi with Hifiberry board? It’s basically a cheap HTPC with SPDIF outlets. You use a browser to control it, and it can access any media on the network or possibly Tidal and Spotify. I think. I set one up a couple years ago but haven’t used it in a while so don’t quote me on that.

Getting everything set up could be a fun project or a nightmarish prank, depending on your outlook.

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11

That works as well, and is more versatile lol. A simple UI should be fairly easy to set up. I don’t know about high Rez playback though

12

Complete overkill, would also need a BT module.

Is not used by anyone in my family.

I got a BananaPi powered NAS for music storage, setting that up was a minor nightmare.

13

What were some of the issues you encountered?

14

Bananian (a Debian spin) is not supported anymore, so installing updates or software will throw a lot of “not found”-errors.
Took me a while to find a Distro that supported the BananaPi’s Sata-Port and was up to date enough for Samba and NextCloud

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15

Ah, yeah I can see that being a pita lol

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16

buy an old gen 2 Apple TV or even better a used Apple Airport Express. They all have Toslink in the 3.5mm port.
Airplay gives the best quality with the old iPad

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17

Yes, that’s a good idea, you can avoid the Bluetooth altogether, although the iPad 2 is fairly old, would it still be supported?

18

according to Apple’s website, this seems to work and if iOS 11.4 is supported even Airplay 2 with 24 bit

19

Check this unit out. I currently use with Gen2 Apple iPad. Last iPad that supports Tidal. I BT into unit, but it has all the attachments you want too. Real solid and clean sound. I like the burr brown dac sound signature.
Check it out for reference anyway. Since it is just beyond your price point and not sure if you can order via global for Europe
BluDento True HiFi Bluetooth… https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07BKXP326?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share

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If he’s just using it as a digital transport, he wouldn’t use the dac in there