HiFi Subjectivist ¦ Audio Forum ¦ NVA User Group

I managed to get Volumio 1.2 fully functional last night. This was effectively the third attempt on a another sd card including the WebUI on my andriod tablet.

The sound quality is very good and all the splashy top end and light bass has gone . I will listen some more before going back to the Squeezebox but first impressions are that the Pi-Dac is better. I will also do a reinstall of the squeezeplug and see if that gives similar sound quality.

It's good to hear someone elses' impressions.

Have you read about the 'new' Raspberry Pi Terry? http://www.raspberrypi.org/introducing- ... el-b-plus/

• Power consumption has been cut by 30 percent to between 0.5W and 1W
• The card slot is now push-push micro SD rather than friction-based full-size SD
• Audio has been improved courtesy of a dedicated low-noise power supply
• The number of USB 2.0 ports has been doubled to four
• The GPIO header now has 40 pins rather than 26
• The design has been tweaked to make it neater and its connections better placed while keeping the same tiny form factor

Point 3 looks useful for you.

[BBvideo 425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtKSyN0x6sk[/BBvideo]

As far as I can see, this will mean that the DAC cards such as the Hifiberry will need to be modified - these use that rank of 10 holes near the main pin header into which you have to solder another pin header which has the I2S interface The external board is now detected by pin 28 of the 40 pin header.

I guess it will be interested to see what the default sound capabilities are, but I doubt that they'd be as extensive as when a DAC board is attached to the previous version. When the board manufacturers catch up (assuming they are still needed) things will be easier but it's a bit of a jump from where I've got to.

There's also a Raspberry Pi 'compute module' which may be another way to go. But, of course, as a wise man in the east end of London once said to me 'What do mean is it new, of course it's not new: it's working!"

For the meanwhile eschewing the latest and greatest Raspberry Pi version, my next experiment is to try the IQ-Audio Pi-Dac. http://iqaudio.com/?page_id=28.

At first glance, this is very similar to the HiFiBerry http://www.hifiberry.com/dac. However, I'm told that the Burr-Brown chip is different and that the maker is ex Texas Instruments so, here we go for another suck it and see session.

This evening has been occupied with sound level problems. Having popped the IQAudio dac card into one of my Pis, enabled it and plugged both of them into the main system, it quickly because apparent that the IQAudio DAC was playing louder than the HiFiBerry. No problem, one of the difference between the two is that the IQAudio card has a hardware volume control. Getting this to work took me around the inevitable loop of a fresh install of Volumio. The only good thing about this evening was that I discovered a soundmeter app for my tablet which appeared to work. So all I've acheived out of this evening is getting the two things to play at roughtly the same volume!

Terry is it as good as a TFS I want one.

I would love you to be able to hear to judge for yourself. One of them I've got set up as a 'demo' version - it's got music on a USB stick and a wifi dongle, so it's easier to set up (so long as you have wifi). Happy to bring it down at some point.

I don't have a TFS now so it would be guess work which is why I asked you - because I trust your judgement.

You have a laptop and a tablet and wireless network, I think. I could send it down but I think it would be better if I could set it up for you.