Martin's Raspberry Pi etc

uglymusicuglymusic
in Digital
This discussion was created from comments split from: Please introduce yourself.

Comments

  • MartinTMartinT
    I'll post in the RPi thread about battery power when I get a moment.

    While I have a reasonable number of SACDs, the beauty of the Ayre is that it's an outstanding CD player too.  So yes, it's in use all the time.
  • uglymusicuglymusic
    So your Pi is dedicated to streaming in the purest sense - from the Internet?

    Mine streams from a NAS drive with all our music and a lot of our DVDs. The CDs are all packed away.
  • MartinTMartinT
    Yes, my Pi is used for streaming from Spotify hi-bitrate (really surprisingly good) and some YouTube.

    I don't bother with file-based playback as I love my CD/SACD collection.
  • uglymusicuglymusic
    edited January 2018
    Yeah. I stream Spotify and Tidal from Apple devices (iOS and MacOS). Tidal is sufficiently better than Spotify, to my ears, to merit the £19.99 a month. But neither is as good as the files I stream locally, which are so good that it was worth ripping thousands of CDs to it!

    I suspect AirPlay may be the limiting factor as far as the external streaming sources are concerned.
  • MartinTMartinT
    AirPlay is probably limiting you.  You could always put Volumio + volspotconnect onto another SD card and try streaming directly for comparison.
  • uglymusicuglymusic
    edited January 2018
    I'll give it a go, but I do prefer MoOde to Volumio, though.

    Edit: there are a lot of plugins for volumio that I haven't seen before.
  • uglymusicuglymusic
    What does pique my interest, though, is the Allo DigiOne.

    Have you compared it to Digi+ Board I use?
  • MartinTMartinT
    Yes, I've previously owned both a Digi and Digi+.  The + was a good increment over the standard Digi but I have to say the DigiOne is a significant step up again.  It seems to benefit from the onboard multi-level PSU regulation (so that it's isolated from the noise generated by the Pi) and the re-clocking that gives a very low jitter output to the S/PDIF cable.  Note there is no optical output.

    Saying that, performance steps up again with a) using a battery PSU and b) setting the DAC to re-clock its inputs.  Everything about optimising digital really helps the SQ, the opposite of 'bits are bits' thinking.
  • uglymusicuglymusic
    edited January 2018
    Thanks for all that, Martin. I had a feeling the DigiOne might be a good thing. Something to put on the buy list for when Christmas and VAT payments have passed ;-)

    I'd go along with what you say about digital tweakery. There are lots of things that challenge 'bits are bits'. The one I'm playing with at the moment is whether uncompressed FLAC files sound better than compressed ones.

    The answer? In a significant amount of cases. So all new downloads or CDs are ending up as uncompressed FLACs, and I'll be adding another hard drive to my NAS before uncompressing the existing files. I'll want to automate as much as possible of that little task!
  • MartinTMartinT
    That's interesting.  The only thing I can think of is the overhead in CPU processing (noise, power consumption) involved in decompressing compressed files.
  • uglymusicuglymusic
    It is a strange one, but there is/was the long-running debate about whether WAVs sound better than FLACs. From my reading, an uncompressed FLAC is, as far as the music data is concerned, the same as a WAV.
  • MartinTMartinT
    One small change is the addition of a snap choke around the S/PDIF cable at the DAC end.  A friend recommended I try it and there is a small gain in overall SQ. You cannot have too much noise and RFI removal.
  • uglymusicuglymusic
    I think I may have one in place on mine, but I'll have to check.

    If not, I'll have to track it down.
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