In a thread I read the suggestion to use an Intel micro-pc instead of using a Raspberry Pi. Since I cannot say that my experience using the Raspberry Pi and IQaudIO DAC is a shiny one, I am creating this thread. The IQaudIO card has nothing to boast about IQ as it sits very closely on the Raspberry Pi with all its digital activity radiating and coupling unwanting signals into it. This results in contaminated output, sometimes even noticeable pauses in music flow. Reading replies in many thread here, suggests that there are far better ways to play music with compared with a Raspberry Pi with a hat sitting on it "happily" eating all sorts of interference and pumping it out through its shiny outputs. Besides of an Intel mini-pc there is also the recommendation to use a USB DAC.
An old android phone makes a good music player... I have several old phones lying around collecting dust. You might, too 🙂
A $50 Windows tablet, stripped down, and running Foobar or something similar, works pretty good.
Am using an Asus Tinkerboard with Volumio on another system. The headless approach uses my phone as an interface.
Most people want to tie in with odd, third party software/devices and act surprised when it doesn’t work out, don’t know what to say about that…
Both of my setups have a thick, steel shield between power supplies, as well as the DAC/tinkerboard. Having separate power supplies is also something that greatly helps.
Am using an Asus Tinkerboard with Volumio on another system. The headless approach uses my phone as an interface.
Most people want to tie in with odd, third party software/devices and act surprised when it doesn’t work out, don’t know what to say about that…
Both of my setups have a thick, steel shield between power supplies, as well as the DAC/tinkerboard. Having separate power supplies is also something that greatly helps.
A tablet is a short lived device, and containing MS Windows is something I want to avoid, that is why, I use a Raspberry Pi with a DAC hat sitting on it. To play music or audio, I do NOT need to have a graphical desktop or window manager running, in fact, I find command line players better and far more flexible. The drawback is modern software writers consider a graphical interface as a given, and till now, I did not find a way to listen to internet radio streams. The URLs of such stations are often hidden from being directly used.
You can reduce the amount of radiated noise on the pi using rfkill to turn off BT and wifi. The other thing I've done with the pi to reduce stuttering which is in my case was caused by buffer underruns is to have aplay pull from a pipe I create and keep filled with a separate program. Nothing else I tried seemed to work for nfs mounted or even the local sd card as the source.
Maybe skipping the RPi/SBC DIYish (click HAT to RPi level) devices and just buying a ready made stable working one is a way to obtain reliability? Many of them are designed solely for audio playback which is eh.. what most would like in an audio player.
I have one that never skips a beat, has no issues with radiating and coupling of unwanted signals and it was cheaper than a recent RPi. There is no point to DIY when there is almost no real benefit in that.
I have one that never skips a beat, has no issues with radiating and coupling of unwanted signals and it was cheaper than a recent RPi. There is no point to DIY when there is almost no real benefit in that.
My work/desk setup uses a dedicated tablet pc that’s running windows 8, but it’s not connected to anything but the DAC, is just a player from memory media only.
Works great, was basically free, has nothing else running on it, and sounds better than any laptop ever did. It basically runs continuously, and has for years now.
For internet radio, the volumio player does the job well without being a total science project. I had the DAC dialed in already, and a used tinkerboard was $60 If I remember. A surplus 4A power supply and some assembly time was about all it took.
Works great, was basically free, has nothing else running on it, and sounds better than any laptop ever did. It basically runs continuously, and has for years now.
For internet radio, the volumio player does the job well without being a total science project. I had the DAC dialed in already, and a used tinkerboard was $60 If I remember. A surplus 4A power supply and some assembly time was about all it took.