What's your most minimal spotify-playing device? (for use with an existing amp)

Hey, I’ve been going through various threads here, but one way or another my use case is a slightly different one, therefore this dedicated thread. Here at home we have both our phones connected to a bluetooth receiver (hooked to an amp), and that’s also so far our usual way of playing something via spotify. I was playing around with adding my phone as a spotify player to be controlled by HA, which of course then only works when I’m at home, and when my phone didnt put my spotify app into deepsleep battery saving mode :wink:
Therefore: which device/hardware would you recommend that can act as a small dedicated spotify player of its own? So nothing that needs e.g. a phone as the actual player and just routes through the audio, but which is connected to spotify itself?
Originally I had my hopes high for the M5 Atom speaker kit m5-docs , but it has really crappy audio quality and also doesnt work as a spotify entity on its own. From what I understood I could install Music Assistant and then “force” the M5 to become the output for spotify, but that is quite a big package to get configured and running, and I then still have a crappy output device to connect to the amp.

So, in a nutshell:

  • audio device that can be hooked to an amp via analogue audio
  • can be a spotify player on its own
  • can be controlled by HA
  • supports halfway decent stereo sound

Doing a bit of hardware work myself is not an issue, so e.g. hooking a DAC to a Squeezelite-esp32 device is something I could accomplish, but the “Stream from a Spotify controller” line in the documentation again sounds as if I would have to hammer Music Assistant onto my HA to get the first sounds to play at all.

Do you have anything running yourself that falls into my usecase? Thanks a lot in advance :slight_smile: