Marantz receiver Airplay with power and volume control

Thank you for providing a Debian distribution for so many devices. I used a Dockstar to bridge a Marantz receiver onto the network with full power and volume control.

It requires a USB sound device that is supported by ALSA, a USB serial adapter and a Marantz receiver that has a serial port (but not an ethernet otherwise I think it already has Airplay built in to the network interface. I'm using a Marantz SR5003.

Get your sound card working under alsa and make sure that aplay can output sound by default. I had to adjust my asound.conf. This will vary based on what USB sound device you use.

defaults.pcm.card 0
defaults.ctl.card 0

pcm.!default {
  type hw
  card 0
  device 0
}

You will need to install alsa-utils libasound2-plugins shairport-sync alsa-ucm-conf python3-serial.

Add user shairport-sync to the dialout group so it can access the USB serial device.

adduser shairport-sync dialout

In shairport-sync.conf there are a few options to adjust. I set wait_for_completion = "yes" so that power and volume commands would not overlap. Then set run_this_when_volume_is_set to the attached python script volume_is_set.py, same for run_this_after_exiting_active_state and run_this_before_entering_active_state. Note that the scripts will log to /tmp/event.log as they are now, comment out the log related statements if desired. Also set ignore_volume_control = "yes" and then run alsamixer and set to 0db so that the sound card outputs full volume and shairport-sync will not adjust the alsa volume, the volume will be set by the serial commands to the Marantz receiver.

I did make a decision to limit the volume range on the Marantz from -71dB to 0dB. It goes higher, 14dB I thought 0db was enough in case something went wrong.

This should be adaptable to any receiver that has a serial port.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/09/2024 03:21PM by frankusb.

frankusb,

Very nice tutorial! Thanks for you contribution. I'll add this to the Wiki thread.

-bodhi
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I forgot one detail, the power on script sets the input to CD. @SRC:C You can set it to other inputs, see here.

Main Zone Source TV,@SRC:1
Main Zone Source DVD,@SRC:2
Main Zone Source VCR,@SRC:3
Main Zone Source DSS,@SRC:4
Main Zone Source AUX,@SRC:9
Main Zone Source CD/CDR,@SRC:C
Main Zone Source FM,@SRC:G
Main Zone Source AM,@SRC:H
Main Zone Source XM,@SRC:J
Main Zone Source Sirius,@SRC:K
Main Zone Source BD,@SRC:M
Main Zone Source M-Xport,@SRC:N

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/09/2024 06:34PM by frankusb.

It seems I forgot more than one detail. I experienced audio dropout during volume changes. I disabled some features in shairport-sync and no longer have any dropout.

interpolation = "basic";
log_verbosity = 0;
metadata =
{
	enabled = "no";

I've attached my complete configuration file in case I missed anything.