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I use a Raspberry Pi with a USB sound card attached to a DAC (just a hi-fi CD recorder) as a Pulseaudio sink, and an NFS server for the media. Then any old Linux laptop can play audio through the main stereo over the network.

Dirt cheap and works really well.

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thanks for the comment - could you give more details? i guess you're using ethernet, but that could be replaced with a usb wifi dongle? what interface are you using from the laptop? just vnc?

Hi. My Pi is hooked up to a powerline network thing just through the RJ45 on the Pi, but I suppose you could use a wifi dongle if you want. On the laptop, you just set the pulse sink to be the Pi's pulseaudio (need avahi running on both to see the Pi in the audio preferences pane on the laptop). You can play whatever you like on the laptop itself and the audio is routed through the Pi, so there's no need to log into the Pi itself once it's set up.

that sounds really cool. thanks very much - will investigate further.

For all of the slagging Pulseaudio gets, built in network transparency is very cool. The client does all of the resampling and rate conversion, so you can ramp up the conversion quality to max on your relatively powerful laptop and the Pi just shunts the bits onto the sound card.

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