I have a similar setup: a raspi 3B+ with a Hifiberry dac pro, running vanilla raspbian (or whatever it is called now), connected to a mid-90s Yamaha AX amplifie

I have a similar setup: a raspi 3B+ with a Hifiberry dac pro, running vanilla raspbian (or whatever it is called now), connected to a mid-90s Yamaha AX amplifier. I set up PulseAudio to run as a system daemon on the raspi so it can receive all audio from my laptop. On the laptop side, I switched to pipewire - it was practically a drop-in replacement, I don't remember having to do much configuration. I also use Raspotify so the raspi appears as a Spotify Connect device. The biggest challenge for me was getting uninterrupted audio playback when watching video content on my laptop, as i'm using wifi to connect to the home network. Everything was ok with my cheap TP-Link router running OpenWRT until I decided to upgrade to a Mikrotik hAp ac2. I got a lot of dropouts when using RouterOS on the MT, tried everything I could think of, even submitted a problem report directly to MT, but they decided that my use case was too unique for them to care about it. After upgrading the MT to OpenWRT, everything is in sync and I don't get any dropouts. As for the volume control problem, I connected a basic IR LED module to the raspi, set up the correct remote in lirc [1] and added buttons to my OpenHAB dashboard for changing the volume, inputs and toggling power. [1]https://lirc-remotes.sourceforge.net/remotes-table.html https://lirc-remotes.sourceforge.net/remotes-table.html