One of the cool features of the Raspberry Media Center devices was the neat Aluminum case that you can place pretty much anywhere around your stereo system. One of the drawbacks of that design was the limited space and wifi antenna constraints, in other words, it would only work with Raspberry Pi Zero. Which is plenty, but not for everyone.

Another obvious drawback is the added cost connected to non-functional features. Not everyone cares much for the case, as I'm sure.

The Raspberry Pi Hat series is here to address both of those issues and one more. It will cost about half the Media Center cost, and pair with pretty much any Pi out there.

Bonus feature - Pi5 supports now multiple data lines on the I2S interface (up to four to be precise). Thus you can have multiple cards on the same Hat, or stacking them together yields 4 stereo outputs, 8 channels in total. That's a call for a multi-room system right there!

HiFi Hat is a HiFi Media Center in compact shape, doubling the audio inputs. Loud Hat is the same story, but using the MAX98357 DAC, four of them to be precise.

Louder Hat uses TAS5805M DAC, just like the Louder Media Center. In that case, doubling thick didn't work, since (a) it needs a 5V drop-down, and oh boy, Pi5 is hungry for it! And (b) TAS5805 needs a good thermal interface and for now, I'm not ready to promise this small board can survive both. Even in that basic configuration, it requires good ventilation. But hey, they used to take whole shelves of those older amps of the same capability, didn't they?

The last one in the family does not have a Media Center Equivalent yet, HiFi Plus uses the same DAC as the HiFi Hat but adds a TPA3110 D-class amp so you can use it with speakers directly. This is very much an experimentation platform for me since I want to play around analog regulators with it (work in progress).

I'm planning to publish all the Hats to Tindie soon, allowing me to fund those experiments moving forward.