Use a tablet as an audiophile grade play back device?

[Android Central Question]

So I have this plan to repurpose a tablet as a HiFi audio player for my home theater. I plan to mount it on a piece of plexigass in a shelf in the rack. It actually turned out really nice.
The problems I seem to face are:

(1) I would like to get the audio as optical spdif out

(2) I need to find a way to control the player on the tablet with a Harmony Elite
remote. This seems to be an issue

(3) And while all that is going on, I need to supply power to all this stuff and keep
the tablet charged as well. At the same time.

No biggie right? I apologize in advance for always having crack-headed ideas, and any help would be very appreciated. I need the optical out to feed a high end Sunfire preamp. Thanks.

 

[Mooncatt]

Your biggest hurdle may be the audio, because no tablet has a native optical output. You would have to run an AUX cable from the headphone jack to a separate analog to digital converter to get it into optical form. I only found one such device, which was on Amazon and not a name I recognize. Even if we assume it does the job without issue, you would not see any increase in audio quality. From my understanding, optical isn't inherently a better quality sound. Its biggest benefit is to electrically isolate the audio signal from background noise that may be induced with poor wiring. Even if the optical is technically capable of higher quality audio, you would still be feeding it from a supposed inferior source, rendering the conversion moot. Unless you have some specific and peculiar reason for needing an optical signal, I would just run an AUX cable from tablet to receiver.

I'm not very familiar with smart universal remotes, but I saw that the harmony remote works with Google Assistant. You may be able to get it to work with the tablet via Assistant commands, but someone more well versed in that area would have to provide the specifics.

For power, you can simply leave the tablet pluged in, but keep in mind this can ruin the battery in short order. I did something similar to that with a phone years ago and the battery was toast in about 6 months.

 

[hallux]

I'm not very familiar with smart universal remotes, but I saw that the harmony remote works with Google Assistant. You may be able to get it to work with the tablet via Assistant commands, but someone more well versed in that area would have to provide the specifics.

I have a Harmony Home Hub. The "Works with Google Assistant" actually means that you can use Google Assistant to control the unit, not the other way around.