I’ve a couple of PI’s with HiFiBerry HAT’s feeding into music systems on a Toslink cable. Works brilliantly and want to extend this to a room with nothing for now. Was thinking of a Pi with an Amp HAT, but more importantly I want a small, self contained, preferably battery powered, system to which i just attach speakers. All suggestions welcome!
Doubt you will get a battery with enough juice to power an amp as well as the pi amps draw a lot of current even class d ones. The HifiBerry ones I have need between 12 and 18 volts. Your looking at a hefty battery pack to do that which would not make it very portable. I use to 25000ma phone battery packs that can easily power a pi and a usb DAC for quite some time. I have two of these for my headphone stations.
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I’ve already used Pi’s with a HifiBerry HAT and Ropieee so familiar with that setup - but, as I suspected, getting portability doesn’t seem likely. I have power points in the space, so I can use those OK. I was just interested in seeing if I could get a more portable solution to take into the garden (for instance)… Hey ho, back to what I know 
It’s easy to build a speaker using them. I have two the are as portable as an extension lead goes with mains power. I used a decent centre channel speaker for one and attached the pi inside and rewired the crossover to make it easy to connect the pi amp, and use Roons DSP to make it mono, sounds really good for what it is was quite astounded. The other is a stereo pair so not quite as portable. But I have used the other in the garden with an extension lead.
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Works great, sounds great. I already had this Anker 25600mAh battery that outputs 5V 4A max. I’m using my Sony WH-1000XM3 noise cancelling headphones.
This makes for a really nice headphone listening experience. Absolutely no noise from the Sony noise cancelling headphones when using battery power. The Dragonfly Cobalt DAC with Sony headphones sounds as good as anything I have experienced.
And, best of all, it’s a great MQA DAC. 
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Not really portable except for moving to other locations around the house. WIFI works great. No need for power. No need for ethernet.
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sort of ups the total price of the kit though I just wonder if you can run the Pi and a HAT off a battery like that. I was thinking of bluetooth pairing the speakers to keep wiring down. Obviously Pi and (rechargable) speakers could run off a couple of mains adaptors in one place, but be nice to carry a couple small boxes outside run mains free !
I like the self contained idea - even if I ran it off the mains cable indoors, and external battery pack outside…
presume you have one Dragonfly and move it between pi’s (or a mahoosive budget, or a good supply chain!)
They work well and all the tech is hidden inside. Just had to drill some holes for power and added an inline DC socket so it’s just nice and neat and PSU just plugs in as it would any device. You can also add an external usb port for external wireless antenna or DAC etc.
The two headphone ones have a DAC each Ifi Nano iDSD on bedroom one, DragonFly Cobalt on the living room one. I originally bought the Nano for my phone but it was just too bulky so decided to add it to a spare pi I had left over. Others are left over from upgrades and my obsessive purchasing phase. I also have a DragonFly Black and Red in use at work and in the latest headphone station in my Dining Room. Chose to use batteries as it less cables not for portable use and it does sound marginally better than using the pi’s PSU.
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