Bringing a Vintage Reel-to-Reel Console Stereo into the Modern World with Raspberry Pi and Volumio

If you’re a music lover with eclectic aesthetic tastes, there is little out there that’s cooler than a vintage stereo console. They’re part furniture, part stereo, and completely perfect for your living room. On a functional level, they often sound really good, as the heavy wood lends itself well to nice, warm acoustics. The flip side, of course, is that they lack the modern amenities that we love, like music streaming and remote control. Luckily, you can modernize your vintage stereo console like WhiskeyDrinker did in this tutorial.

WhiskeyDrinker’s stereo console is a vintage Penncrest reel-to-reel model from the 1960s. Unlike record players, which are still popular in some groups, reel-to-reel players are practically useless these days. So, WhiskeyDrinker set out to replace the reel-to-reel mechanism with a touch screen Raspberry Pi setup. In a practice that today’s companies should really bring back, the Penncrest included a wiring schematic, which was remarkably still intact when WhiskeyDrinker bought it.

Using that, he cleaned up the wiring and replaced the output from the reel-to-reel with the output from the Raspberry Pi. He chose Volumio because it has a lot of nice features for streaming from various sources. But, as a huge bonus, it also has support for GPIO buttons. Using those, WhiskeyDrinker was able to use the stereo console’s original buttons, which goes a long way to replicating that vintage feel. The finished product looks amazing, and has all the features you’d expect from a modern stereo.