6moons audio reviews: Eastern Electric MiniMax DAC says your DAC uses PCM2707 which is a regular USB -audio v.1 receiver. Should work just fine in linux for years http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/digital-line-level/240053-pcm2707-i2s-output-alsa.html JEDAC - yet another take on a DIY high-end USB Audio DAC
Hi phofman,
Thanks for taking the time out to check up on this.
The difference is that I have the MiniMax DAC Plus, a later model with an asynchronous USB board derived from M2Tech. The DAC needs drivers, which can be found on the M2Tech website but only for PC and OSX platforms.
There is a link to 3rd party unsupported Linux drivers, but I could not get the code to compile on my Debian/ARM architecture.
As a stopgap, I am using an old Soundblaster Live! external card as a USB-SPDIF converter. I used it purely as a test box since it needs no drivers, but as it happens it sounds surprisingly good, which makes me confident about the RPi as a music player front-end.
The hiface1 usb driver exists for some time. It is part of stock alsa since this June kernel/git/tiwai/sound.git - Sound sub-system tree . It is already in linux 3.11 kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git - Linux kernel source tree Perhaps RPi kernel devs would tell you how to compile the latest 3.11 for RPi. Or perhaps someone managed to compile the driver for existing RPi kernels, the driver itself is rather simple. Did you check google?
Yep, I've been through all the obvious options.
The 'C' code is indeed fairly straightforward - which makes it all the more frustrating. The compilation problem for me has been around the dependencies. It isn't necessary to rebuild the kernel, you can just build the driver separately within the distribution. But running the makefile fails, due to several missing header files. I spent a bit of time with it, but tired of the various web trawls to find what I needed. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be much of an audiophile RPi community with which to compare notes.
If I took a day or two off I'm sure I could fix this as I used to do this stuff day in day out a few years ago. But it's not really a priority, since the USB performance (experienced via my Mac Mini when I first bought the EE DAC) has hardly blown me away.
The SPDIF interface, even with the RPi and a crappy external soundcard in between for the conversion task, beats it hands down - more 'analoguey' and more resolution.
Anyway, thanks for taking an interest in this. I think there is loads of potential with using a RPi as a front end, and I'm already experimenting with DIY regulated power supplies and different MPD configs in order to squeeze the most out of this platform. Much for me still to learn, though.
The 'C' code is indeed fairly straightforward - which makes it all the more frustrating. The compilation problem for me has been around the dependencies. It isn't necessary to rebuild the kernel, you can just build the driver separately within the distribution. But running the makefile fails, due to several missing header files. I spent a bit of time with it, but tired of the various web trawls to find what I needed. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be much of an audiophile RPi community with which to compare notes.
If I took a day or two off I'm sure I could fix this as I used to do this stuff day in day out a few years ago. But it's not really a priority, since the USB performance (experienced via my Mac Mini when I first bought the EE DAC) has hardly blown me away.
The SPDIF interface, even with the RPi and a crappy external soundcard in between for the conversion task, beats it hands down - more 'analoguey' and more resolution.
Anyway, thanks for taking an interest in this. I think there is loads of potential with using a RPi as a front end, and I'm already experimenting with DIY regulated power supplies and different MPD configs in order to squeeze the most out of this platform. Much for me still to learn, though.
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