I totally agree that we should avoid the 'best thing since sliced bread' but this is all about a journey and not about arriving.Welder wrote:Whoa! Lets get give some proportion to this.
The PI is a computer; it’s not some magical bit of electronics that outshines any other computer when it comes to audio; all computers can deliver bit perfect audio to a dac.
What is special imo is the price and the simplicity of the motherboard. It’s still just a computer.
The dacs; yep they give outstanding performance for the money but there are better dacs in just about every respect.
I’m not knocking the PI and\or the many dacs that can be stacked directly on the PI board.
but the hype is more than the product and that’s not so good.
The point for me at least is you would be very hard pressed to equal the two combinations I’ve heard for the money and that I am afraid is as far as it goes.
I’m listening to my my music centre and Benchmark dac still because it’s better. Yes it costs ridiculously more money but it is better without a doubt.
If others prefer or consider the PI equal or better than their flagship CD players and tweaked dacs then I say this says more about the shortcomings of the original kit and not so much about the PI and dac combo.
Fretless is telling us that he found his Pi/HiFiBerry Dac sounds different/better. This I think is significant because the Pi is only acting as a transport here - all the analogue stuff is happening offboard, so if 'all computers can deliver bit perfect audio to a dac', why does this sound different? (Note I say different, not 'better' at this point.)
If I can briefly describe my digital journey.
Starts with a 'flat earth' system and a Naim CDI
This sounded 'OK' but not 'better' than the analogue system (probably due to background brainwash).
With a house move and family, the system languised plus I didn't pay for the 6 monthly tweak/upgrade that was necessary to keep me happy with it.
I built a CD system with 'spare' kit. The CDI migrated to that.
This became the system I listened to music on.
I heard a rumour that John Farlowe was going to go back into production (I have Exposure Amps) a bit of googling brought me to NVA and eBay to a secondhand AP50.
I remember a friend telling me that rather than 'source first', a CD system needed 'better' amplification (pick the bones out of that statement from someone who was also 'flat earth), so the amplification started to be beefed up and I started to 'get' what NVA was about.
CDI went and TFS came. Did it sound 'better' probably not much but one thing I found was that a ripped CD sounded better than a played CD.
TFS was augmented by an outboard DAC at the suggestion of the TFS maker - first one, NAH, second one, yes better.
TFS was OK but felt really 'clunky' to me and I found what appeared to be an approach based on 'minimalism' which is what I like about NVA.
In particular, I was attracted by this claim: https://volumio.org/raspberry-pi-i2s-da ... s-so-good/
So, I've spend many hours trying to figure what sounds better. Certainly the Pi plus external DAC isn't wonderful (this appears to be down to the implementation of the USB bus on the Pi). To me, the PI doesn't sound worse than the TFS, so the TFS was sidelined.
And now, I'm playing around with the power supply to see if that makes a difference to me.
Back to the computers. The Intel x86 architecture one architecture, the Pi is a different architecture. They apparently do things differently. Is one better than the other for music reproduction: I don't know. Put on top of that, the operating system; does that make a difference in sound quality: I think it does but I haven't found differences in the Pi world (then I haven't tried). However, the most important thing for me in the Pi world is that is is all open-source and that is a great environment for experimentation and development: it makes the journey more interesting for me.