Being Canadian, I'm not familiar with Pandora which is unavailable here. So in any of the following, I must advise that if sourcing from Pandora is a priority for you, do make sure it is possible via the solution you choose.
However, there are alternatives, some free like
TuneIn and
Spotify (free with ads) and others paid, my preference being
Tidal (Spotify paid and Deezer also). imho, Pandora is getting a bit long in the tooth
I do have a background in IT, but that shouldn't by itself deter you, especially if you are on a tighter budget and/or are willing to engage in a bit of fun learning.
I have some experience with
BlueSound and
Raspberry Pi along with Pi-affiliated gear from
HiFiBerry. (Note the link I supplied for the Pi is a complete media center package, but beware it uses HDMI for sound output I believe. The Pi has an ordinary audio out, but the HiFiBerry solutions are have better audio quality).
Bluesound is a sister company to NAD electronics and PSB speakers, see
Lenbrook. I have a NAD C390DD digital amplifier with a Bluesound
add-on module from NAD. It's beautiful. However, I just now fired it up and used my tablet interface to look at the Music services available and although there are several,
Pandora is not amongst them. So again, proceed bearing in mind your degree of commitment to Pandora.
This is rambling a bit ... sorry ... but if you want a ready-made solution, I think you might look at BlueSound and
Sonos, but be prepared to pay!! Also, someone here mentioned Axiom's new offering as well.
About the Raspberry, I have 3 with each one having one of the 3 offerings from HiFiBerry; the Digi+ produces digital audio out via coax and optical, the AMP+ has an onboard amp to connect directly to speakers, and the DAC+ has left/right outputs for connecting to an amplifier. BlueSound and Sonos have analogous options.
For software, I start with
Max2Play because it packages everything I need, but you might also look at
Roon as discussed in the Youtube vid you found. Max2Play says it is an "operating system" but in reality it is a package of Linux software that runs on the Pi and is configured with a wen browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox or Safari on the Mac. In the package there are several options and you will likely not engage them all.
Instructions they provide are pretty thorough, but on occasion you must think a bit. (The Raspberry Pi uses a Micro-SD card like you use in a camera as a hard drive to function like the one in a PC. You download the image you want onto a PC/Mac and then 'burn' it to the MicroSD card using freely available software from the Internet. If that 'scares' you, you can usually have a preloaded SD card mailed to you for a nominal fee, as described
here for example.
To control the Pi's I use an Android app called
SqueezeCtrlx. Not sure if it's available on Apple tablets.
If you want to pursue further, I'll watch here for a bit or you could PM me.
Cheers!
Tim
