Rasperry Pi and Hifiberry as media center

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I just received my Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, Hifiberry DAC+ Standard and the standard RPi PSU. I've been wanting to replace my midi tower PC (running a Creative X-Fi Platinum) because it makes too much fan noise, and it's quite big. Not that I will get rid of it - it's great if I ever want to watch 4.0 movies or whatever.

I read a couple of things about the Raspberry Pi's I2S and what have you, but I don't know. My background is electronic engineering, and I just don't see how it can be a problem with a PLL and fairly jitter-tolerant DAC, especially one from TI. I mean, even if jitter causes dynamic range to be limited to 95 dB, that's still a good spec, IMO.

Anyway, I haven't found much that actually measures this combination as being bad, so I got myself the kit and I managed to get it working fairly easily.

I tried OpenELEC, but it just didn't work as easily as I wanted. I started struggling to get the Pi to pick up the Hifiberry. There are other options, so I just wasn't keen to struggle. So I installed OSMC. I tried to configure it for Hifiberry via SSH, but that didn't work either, so I just checked the OSMC settings, and there is a nice configuration editor there, so I removed a line that said "dtparam=audio=off" and added configuration for "dtoverlay=hifiberry-dacplus". This config I added was already there, but it had something appended which I removed. Anyway, after a reboot, I selected the Hifiberry, no problems.

Useful links:
https://www.hifiberry.com/blog/configuring-osmc/
https://www.hifiberry.com/build/documentation/configuring-linux-3-18-x/

My thoughts on quality - no issues. Really, it sounds perfect. I can't tell any difference between this and my PC. I would have liked to configure the sampling frequency on the Pi, because I would have set that to 48 kHz (resampled), but I'm not going to get myself into that. It's too much effort and I have other things to do.

The Hifiberry DAC+ Standard uses a TI PCM5122, which is nice. It's a good DAC, as far as I know. The implementation looks very much like what TI would recommend on the datasheet, but what's wrong with that?

There is only one thing to mention, and that is that there is a little hum when the DAC is not in use. Like a floating input (very quiet though). I suspect this is either when the DAC is off, or due to the power supply. I will investigate further, but I suspect this unit will be best plugged into a preamplifier, or at least, part of a preamplifier. I am currently building said preamplifier, but the digital part was something I wanted to figure out. It seems the Raspberry Pi and Hifiberry are great for the digital part of my preamplifier, so here goes designing that finished and building it! It's going to be a good one, I think. :)

For controlling Kodi, I used mrRemote For Kodi on my Nokia Lumia 930 (Windows Phone 10). No problems so far. Works like a bomb! :)
 
So I figured out that it's not editing the config that makes any difference (I mean, you do need to add the config). You need to re-select the Hifiberry as the DAC (in the hardware section, I think) and then reboot. This is necessary even if the Hifiberry is showing as selected. Once rebooted, you can select the output device in Kodi settings.
 
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