That would, in my opinion, be a mistake. The empeg is a reliable, resilient system with excellent audio output, a lot of tolerance to power supply fluctuations, and is specifically designed for high vibration environments.

The Raspberry Pi is none of the above

That said, it has two things going for it - it's cheap, and it's quite fast. The reliability can be improved significantly by powering it from a source other than the micro USB socket. The audio is more of a problem. While it's acceptable, it's certainly not audiophile grade (it needs a lot more silver plating for skin effect reduction, for example ). I have been considering doing a small expansion board that would give a better codec, but haven't yet had the time.

I am in the process of designing a nice acrylic box to put the Pi, a small switch-mode PSU, and the display board in, which would give a neat table-top audio player.

I'm not convinced it's the right hardware for a car player, though.

What I have been wondering is if there is any point in doing a replacement display board for existing empegs that uses the OLED panel. The display area of the OLED is about 1mm smaller horizontally and vertically than the VFD, and it's at least as bright. One problem is that it's much more monochromatic, so it needs a filter exactly the right colour or most of the light goes away.

pca