Another Summer Audio Project

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Another Summer Audio Project

By jrobbins50

In 2006, we purchased our current home, built in 1985 in the Minneapolis suburbs (about 20 minutes from Chris Connaker’s residence), and have had it under constant renovation ever since.  A major job was renovating our outdoor living space which, after expansion and including the pool, is a bit over 6,000 square feet.

That’s a fireplace and pizza oven, with a water feature, at the top on the right and a yet unfinished outdoor kitchen roughed in at the top on the left.  My wife is quite the gardener.  We are devoid of chickens (sorry Chris!), although my wife would like peacocks strutting around our yard.  We’ve settled for having our two small dogs roam about.

For the past decade, audio for the patio and garden area has been simply supplied by a single pair of Dayton Audio 8” outdoor speakers, connected via legacy wiring through the house to the second zone of an Integra receiver in our living room, fed by Roon through a microRendu to a Pro-Ject Pre-Box S2 Digital DAC.  Those speakers are looking long in the tooth nowadays.

We have now replaced the old Dayton speakers with a new pair, (link)  These are IP66 rated for outdoor use so they will stay outside through our cold, dark Minnesota winters.

You can see them here on the upper patio, before tidying up the wiring and repainting the exterior.  This time around, we mounted them up higher.

But, even these new speakers suffer from the same problem as with the old ones:  to hear the music out into the patio and gardens requires boosting the volume level unreasonably for those sitting up closing to the house.  And then, you can’t hear well anyway when you get out over on the other side of the pool.

We needed a better, more distributed, system to cover this space properly.  And I didn’t want to spend $15,000 or more for really high quality audiophile-grade powered speakers for a use case that mostly is lounge-style background music.  But, I still wanted to use Roon as my control interface.  We are fortunate to have outdoor power outlets located all around the gardens, so working with powered speakers or an amplifier for the new system was doable.

Having had a good experience for many years with outdoor Dayton Audio components (which are from Parts Express), we determined to use their materials again to create three separate two-channel systems to distribute around the patio, each with its own dedicated 10” IP66-rated, 150W subwoofer (link).

You can see with the arrows where we mounted the Dayton Audio 6-1/2 inch IP66-rated two-way speakers (link).

Here are the three separate areas where we located the systems:

The electronics powering each system consists of a Raspberry Pi3B programmed to act as a Roon Bridge through DietPi.  The DAC for each system is an Audioquest Dragonfly Black, directly plugged into a USB port on the rpi3B.  Power for the main speakers is from a small two-channel 50W amplifier board, with 100W for the subwoofer and volume and tone controls (link).

Volume is set at full level, with Roon controlling the volume for each endpoint either separately or, as I have it, for all three systems grouped together as a single system.  I had to apply a little delay to two of the endpoints so that as one walks around the patio, there is no echo from one system to the next.

Although the amp board also works with Bluetooth (5.0, even though the literature says 4.0), I did not want a system that would be dependent on my phone being nearby for a music source.  While I as well would prefer to use Roon wirelessly outdoors, it is notoriously bad running wireless with rpi’s as endpoints, so we needed ethernet cabling.  The problem is that I had no outdoor RJ45 port connected to ethernet.  We therefore took one of our Orbi mesh network satellites, brought it outdoors and connected its RJ45 ports via dedicated ethernet runs to the three outdoor systems.  The rpi’s were set for wired connections only and thus “tricked” into thinking that they were running wired, even though the internet connection to the outdoor Orbi is wireless.

This was now a very nice sounding working system, but none of the electronics were housed in anything to protect against the elements.  I also wanted a simple way to collect the electronics before winter to store them in the house until the following spring.

We settled on customizing 50 caliber plastic ammunition boxes from Harbor Freight to act as waterproof vessels to hold the electronics for the new system.  (link).

Each box is now outfitted with speakON connectors for both the subwoofer and the mains, and an RJ45 jack for the external ethernet connection.

The inside of each box holds the 24VDC, 5A switching power supply (link), the rpi and DAC and the amplifier board.  Note that the internal case holding the amplifier was part of a larger Harbor Freight ammo box that we did not otherwise use, repurposed as shown.  There is a hole drilled in the side of the ammo boxes we used as well for the power supply cable, which then runs to one of our outdoor outlets.

We made a separate box with three RJ45 external connectors to hold the Orbi satellite and its power supply within.

My wife rarely comments on my audio projects, but this is one that she definitely thought was a big upgrade for our outdoor living space.  (“Like the Bellagio pool in Las Vegas!,” she exclaims.) And it hides pretty well.

A shout-out to my brother-in-law, Enrique Stiles, who, whilst visiting us for three weeks from California, identified and sourced the system components and did the work to create the custom housing boxes.  He is a loudspeaker design engineer with multiple patents on subwoofer technologies.  Stay tuned for his new project, bringing to market a new generation of the vintage ADS loudspeakers that were popular in the 1970s and 1980s!
 

About the author - Jeffrey C. Robbins