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What would the boffin squad here recommend for starting with a Pi?
Going for the HifiBerry DAC or the Wolfson soundcard or both?

I am looking for something that will run 24-bit audio and maybe DSD as well.

I want something that plays music

I usually start my Pi with Mashed tatties n peas.

Whilst listening to music through a real system..........

Fretless wrote:What would the boffin squad here recommend for starting with a Pi?
Going for the HifiBerry DAC or the Wolfson soundcard or both?

I am looking for something that will run 24-bit audio and maybe DSD as well.

All you get with a Pi plus anything (or nothing) is a music streamer. Where your files are is a consideration when building the system.

I have used Raspberry Pi Bs and a B+. I haven't tried the latest and greatest versions. There are many different variations now. I haven't tried the 2.

The B+ and the 2 have the advantage that you will have to do no soldering to get a DAC board on it.

I have tried the following DAC Boards: the HiFiberry Dac, the Dacberry 3, the IQAudio DAC and the IQAudio Pi Dac +. The first three are for the Raspberry Pi B and require you to solder a header onto the Pi board.

The Software I use is Volumio. I have tried others but Volumio seems to work best for me. I use Sound@Home on Android as a remote or I use the Web Browser interface built into Volumio.

I have had more issues getting the IQAudio DACs working than the HiFiBerry BUT I haven't tried the HiFiBerry DAC +

I went for the HiFiBerry initially because it seemed the simplest solution: All the other DACs had 'features' I didn't think necessary.

So, what I know works and what I might recommend are different. The old PI seems to have disappeared, so I can't recommend the older DACS. So, if I were starting now, it would probably be with a Raspberry Pi B+ (which I know works with Volumio and a IQAudio DAC +) and a HiFiBerry DAC+ (which I haven't tried). Plus an appropriate case (either the one supplied by the board manufacturer or a 'bone' case (just a top and a bottom).

With Volumio, this will give you the ability to stream Internet Radio and up to 192khz/24bit music files (I use FLAC) but will not work with DSD.

If your music is on an external USB disk drive, you may need to think about powering this separately (e.g. a powered USB hub in the first instance). If you have a wired network and a NAS, that' what I have. I've tried connecting to the NAS via a wireless network but haven't been successful in getting that to work (not sure why not and some seem to have succeeded in doing this).

There's an old B+ and hifiberry on ebay. This is what I use.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Raspberry-Pi- ... 20f964ccf4

Thanks for this Terry. I am investigating the possibilities here and this tells me what to look for. Files are on a NAS and connections are all wired Ethernet.

I suspect the only issue you will have is getting Volumio to create mounts for the NAS. I've had two issues: when using CIFS, I'd get gaps in the sound (plus you need to tell it how to authenticate in the advanced options with sec=ntlm) I switched to NFS which is more straightforward to connect and reliable BUT with the latest volumio it can fail because it fails to create the mount point (in my experience, but I could just have had a duff write of Volumio).

I'll take all of this into account Terry - and have also been looking at the media centre software from Rune.

Just ordered a Pi B+ with HifiBerry Digi+ (with output transformer) - thought I'd go for the digital output version as my intention is to replace the Sonos Connect currently running through my MF M1DAC.

Setting up a NOOBS card and looking forward to getting started, should arrive on wednesday.

Perhaps open a thread and keep us posted. I've tried the Pi with an external USB dac but not with an external dac driven through the HiFiBerry (mine are the RCA version).

Meanwhile

I have a couple of experiments to assemble and test.

Here's No 1
Here the idea is 'big Torroid' for the power supply.

The torroidal transformer has two 9v secondaries. One of them will go to a step-down (IC based) power supply to convert to +5v DC which will then be fed through the USB cable.

The USB cable has been 'borrowed' from an old computer (therefore will be USB 1 or 2 spec) but in borrowing it, I decided to have a look at the computer power supply
This has a number of useful outputs:
The +5v and +3.3v could possibly be used to power the HiFiBerry DAC separately from the Pie itself.

Experiment 1 is now assembled and in the main system. I don't think it has made anything worse. But I don't think I'll know what it is doing until I take it out of the system and revert to the wall-wart power supply.

Experiment 2 has been assembled. This is the same as experiment 1, however, the power supply board has been replaced for one which looks beefier (and can deliver 5 amps) and I've made up a USB power supply cable from some 1.5mm two core flex which sounded like a really good idea until I tried soldering it to the USB plug. It works, but it doesn't look pretty.