Life of Pi

[terrybooth]

MartinT has put together a useful guide over on TAS (thanks, saves me doing it!). http://theaudiostandard.net/thread/1241 ... o-streamer

[George Hincapie]

What an excellent guide! Thanks for the link Terry

[Firebug1]

http://www.audiophonics.fr/en/diy-dac/a ... 10384.html. One chap on AoS has built that kind of pi...

[Fretless]

Having been laid up with the flu for the last 10 days or so (better now, it was nasty), I had some time to listen to some music and work my way through David Mitchell's last 2 books 'The Bone Clocks' & 'Slade House' (essential reading for fantasy / Stephen King / Clive Barker fans. Try 'Slade House' first).

So the Pi got a lot of use. Well, you don't have to stand up every so often to change a disc - or if the album doesn't fit your mood then you just pick something else with your smartphone. Easy.

With the new Profigold Oxypure Toslink in place the system was sounding really good, most enjoyable.

After a couple of days of intensive use I began to notice something - the battery was still not needing a recharge. In fact, about the time I expected it to be empty it was still half-full. For quite a while now I have been using an Xtorm powerbank with a 5V/3A output and this drives the Pi 2B excellently, and usually needed a charge about once a fortnight on normal use (a couple of hours per day) - that was with a coax connection.

Looking at the output connections of the Hifiberry Digi+ board mounted on the Pi, you can see that the optical output is lit up even when the Coax output is being used. So that is always active. I assume that a coaxial connection will use quite a bit of power as it is pushing current down the wire to send the necessary data. Trying to find out about the power consumption requirements of the two connections I could see that a toslink transmitter needs about 0.05W to drive it. What I cannot find is a description of the power consumption needed to run an electrical SPDIF link - but I expect it is considerably more.

What I did find here:
difference-between-50-ohm-and-75-ohm-coaxial
was information about digital signals through coax cables - and that if there is an impedance mismatch then signal quality can be degraded by up to 5%. This might explain why the Pi/Digi+ appears to be very picky about which coax cable is used with it.

Anyway - those using a Pi on a battery supply might well want to consider the optical link - with a 'good' toslink cable - if you're getting annoyed by too-frequent recharge cycles.

Thats it for now, have a pleasant weekend.

[Fretless]

Geek alert !!!

Photos have been leaked of a new Raspberry Pi 3 that has inbuilt Wifi and Bluetooth LE support.



Some details here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/26/raspberry_pi_3/

[slinger]

I thought this was interesting. Glad to see they have their finger on the pulse...NOT!

http://www.stuff.tv/news/exclusive-rasp ... government

[Fretless]

Canadian audio manufacturer Bryston have announced a new network player, the BDP-pi.



Basically it is an RPi & Hifiberry Digi+ in a nice box with power supply, screen and remote.
For all those who don't like the hassle !

Some info here : http://canadahifi.com/bryston-reveals-f ... ic-player/

[terrybooth]

Hmm. Doesn't say what OS they are using. Clearly easy to replace, but really ought to be part of the package. And given that most of the hassle of getting it going is OS based (unless you can plug it into a network), not sure that it saves that much of that.

[Fretless]

For a while I have been trying to work out how I can get a network headphone-only installation running for next to my chair in the sitting room when I need an alternative to someone else's TV choice. Then I remembered ....



I have one of these lying around unused at the moment, it's a Roland UA25EX digital musical interface that allows you to attach musical instruments (i.e. electric guitars/basses) to a computer so you can record them. It's a USB device and I was wondering if I could run it from a Pi as a DAC/headphone amp, so I hooked it up to my Pi/Hifiberry that runs Volumio and - suprise - the Volumio OS recognised it straightaway and I was able to switch the audio output over to it and use the inbuilt headphone amp section with its own volume control, getting a pretty good performance.

Next step will be to get hold of a single Pi board with a 3A power supply to also drive the UA25EX (which takes its power from the host USB supply) and then I have a super-compact headphone system. This DAC also has RCA output so it can run through a normal amp as well.

Fun and games !!

(new Grado headphones arriving soon!)

[Fretless]

Okay Pi fans - here's a peek into the future with the first 'concept release' of Volumio 2 !!!

Download link for the zip file:
http://updates.volumio.org/pi/volumio/0 ... pi.img.zip

It's looking good and sounding great. Nice touch is that the album artwork is also displayed on the playback screen.

BUT - on the downside - it is not quite the finished product and I do not appear to be able to get the previous Volumio back in for a direct comparison. Also the new version is less tweakable, with no bitrate selection or alternative kernel profiles (yet).

For the adventurous. Suck it and see.