odio·love

odio·love

In 2016, I almost bought a smart amp. The ones with the inputs I needed — phono included — were expensive, and one thought kept nagging me: the day the manufacturer decided my hardware wasn’t worth supporting anymore, that money would be gone. So I bought a dumb amp instead. A €35 Raspberry Pi B+, a HiFiBerry DAC, a wooden box. I’d do the smart part myself — a free machine between the amp and the rest of the world, where no one else held the lease.

Over the years I tried everything: Volumio, RuneAudio, Mopidy, Pi MusicBox. Three times Volumio. Each time the same story: Locked appliances, Bluetooth that barely worked, audio cracks, half-broken setups. Never quite right. Never quite mine.

During the first COVID lockdown, I finally stopped tweaking other people’s system and built what I actually wanted. The Pi B+ is still running. It’s 2026.

Hardware doesn’t become obsolete. Someone decides it is.

In 2022, Sonos pushed a software update that permanently degraded its older speakers, hardware that worked perfectly the day before. Not a technical necessity. A choice. Pay for new hardware or accept a worse product you already bought.

Two years later, a mandatory app rewrite silently removed dozens of features overnight. Same hardware. Same network. Alarms gone. Local library, gone. The product you bought runs on software you don’t control, updated on a schedule you didn’t choose.

And it’s not always a software update. A Marantz A/V receiver from 2012 still plays, still amplifies, still has its web radio menu — but the directory service behind it now charges a yearly fee to add a single station. A PURE Evoke radio became a dumb radio overnight when its directory was shut down. The hardware never broke. The backend did, on purpose.

Every mandatory account to stream audio inside your own home is a lock you didn’t choose. Every €60/year subscription for Bluetooth, a 25-year-old protocol, is a rent on something you already own. Every dropped Pi model is a device that becomes e-waste not because it stopped working, but because a roadmap said so.

Every streaming session has become data, to be collected, profiled, monetized. It’s not a side effect, it’s their model. For the entire lifetime of your device.

odio is a refusal. Not of progress, but of the model where someone else holds the keys to what you own and use that to steal and sell your data. A DAC plugged into a thirty-year-old amp, a Pi bought last decade, still running in 2026 because every layer is replaceable, every protocol is open, and nothing in the stack depends on a company staying alive or benevolent. That same hardware now speaks AirPlay, Spotify Connect, Tidal, and talks to Home Assistant through an API that didn’t exist two months ago. Free software is not just a philosophy here. It is the engineering condition for durability and sustainable hardware, and the only foundation on which you can keep building without starting over.

Keeping a 10+ yo board alive in 2026 is not nostalgia. The most sustainable device is the one already manufactured.