Asus Tinker

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Tinker Board and Volumio -- Damn Good Sound

Have Volumio up and running on my Tinker Board. USB out to my DAC. It sounds very good. Also have listened through the Tinker Board headphone out. Not bad at all. TB is running into my TEAC DAC and into a Bryston amp and Vandersteen speakers. Run it via the Volumio app or web-based GUI on my iPhone or iPad and either wirelessly or through ethernet. Nice in pulling files from my MyCloud NAS on second floor of my house and sending over wireless to TB. No dropouts! Also can stream music files from my iPhone or iPad to the TB with Volumio. True high-quality sound for less than $100 invested in TB, 8 GB micro card, 5 v power supply and USB cable. I supposed it might sound even better if you run the USB into a purifier before entering DAC, if you believe in such stuff. Or you could spend $1,200 on the Bryston Rasp. pi based system that basically does the same thing. Hmmmm. DIY rules! TB is a fine little unit, but I doubt it will succeed much given how little support vs the world of Rasp pi.
 
Just got a Tinker Board on eBay for $53 with shipping. So in a few days will load Volumio on it and via its USB outlet connect to my Emotiva DAC and tell you what I think. If that does not produce quality sound, I will look for a compatible SPDIF out HAT.

That's a good deal. You are mostly using it as a player. If only for audio, you are barely scratching its capabilities.

I recently found a nice site that compared the Pi 3, Tinker board, and some other platforms:
ASUS Tinker Board Is An Interesting ARM SBC For About $60 USD Review - Phoronix
The Tinker has about 2x to 4x the floating point processing horsepower when comparing single core processing. For example, the FFTW benchmark (FFTW is the core of FIR filter processing code) has the Tinker at 4x the Pi 3. For the software DSP processing that I do, that's nice because it's all FP operations. Also the Tinker has separate USB and ethernet chips whereas the Pi runs the ethernet through the USB interface. I tend to use USB based audio interfaces, so its another area that is an improvement over the Pi 3.

I like the Tinker a lot. If the OS can mature one more cycle I think they have a very nice product. Even as it is now, it's better than the Pi 3 for audio DSP type work.
 
Charlie L:

Agree, and have read about all the online reviews and what has been posted in the Tinkerboard forum. Really no need for a HAT dac of SPDIF out HAT for me since I have 3 dacs and all work with the Tinker and Volumio. While I am a digital beginner compared to you (see your posts here and at PE), I will really be happy at the point I could use this for DSP or crossovers. For $60 bucks it is a hell of a little unit. Moores Law. It is fine for casual listening via the headphone out. It rocks through my Emotiva DACs. Wireless from my WD MyCloud from an upstairs office to my main floor living room is no issue -- no drop outs. Lots of fun.
 
I have been impressed with the Tinker board but have not been able to get an audio interface that I own (a Behringer FCA610) to work with it until now. I finally ditched the Tinker OS and installed DietPi. Configuration is a little different with DietPi - the initial software installation is minimal. It doesn't even install ALSA! But you are prompted to select what "else" to install at first boot up. You might want to give DietPi a try!

For audio work, the FCA610 I am using is great for the price. The USB based unit has 4 analog audio and SPDIF inputs, SPDIF output plus 8 analog output channels. Makes for a great multichannel crossover...
 
Is there any info on the specs of the spdif "contact point" of the TB?
The RK3288 has spdif out, but the actual pin/ball (EA12) isn't featured in the schematics. Also, the board apparently has an ALC4040 Audio codec which I can't find anything about, bit might provide spdif as well...
So, I am not sure what the contact point is actually connected to and how to make it available via an rca connector.
 
Is there any info on the specs of the spdif "contact point" of the TB?
The RK3288 has spdif out, but the actual pin/ball (EA12) isn't featured in the schematics. Also, the board apparently has an ALC4040 Audio codec which I can't find anything about, bit might provide spdif as well...
So, I am not sure what the contact point is actually connected to and how to make it available via an rca connector.

ALSA might provide some hints. I listed all the possible audio outputs and their formats using aplay -L. There is only one SPDIF output listed, under card=Audio, as IEC958, S/PDIF. This seems to be the ALC4040 codec that you mentioned, since there are other entries for "CARD=rockchipminiarm" but none of them are the IEC958 type.

I think you could safely connect the SPDIF pin and GND to a DAC, send audio to the CARD=AUDIO device and expect audio to be sent to the DAC. The VLC player should be able to send audio to the SPDIF output, or you can use ecasound to specify it directly.


The SPDIF out is a PTH on my board, not a (surface) contact point. The clearance to the ethernet and USB connectors is pretty tight but you might be able to squeeze it in, or install with header pins pointing out the bottom. Below is a pic of it where you can see the thru-holes clearly. NOTE THAT NEITHER OF THESE IS GND! The other PTH is for PWM IIRC. You will need to connect to a GND on the GPIO header.
image.php
 
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Thanks, I guess I'll just have to jump in and try.
The TB isn't that expensive, but it is my only one :)
You meant Volumio when you mentioned vlc or are you running vlc on the TB?
I use Volumio, in the settings you can just select 'SPDIF' as output device on the TB.
 
Thanks, I guess I'll just have to jump in and try.
The TB isn't that expensive, but it is my only one :)
You meant Volumio when you mentioned vlc or are you running vlc on the TB?
I use Volumio, in the settings you can just select 'SPDIF' as output device on the TB.

I've not ever used Volumio or any other "re-packed" audio-specific distro. I personally don't really find them necessary, or useful, for the things I do.

I use apt-get to install software, so at the command line I would run:
Code:
sudo apt-get install vlc
to install the VLC player and any dependencies on the system.
 
...
Code:
sudo apt-get install vlc
to install the VLC player and any dependencies on the system.

If you'll decide to use UI you can have a look at Peppy player software:
Software * project-owner/Peppy.doc Wiki * GitHub
Here are some screenshots:
Screenshots * project-owner/PeppyPlayers.doc Wiki * GitHub

It can support VLC, MPD and MPLAYER. You can just install it using
apt-get on any Linux or Windows system. It was developed for small displays/touchscreens but can be used with any resolution. It also has Web UI which looks/feels the same as UI in touchscreen.

Here is the functionality available in Peppy player for VLC:
vlc * project-owner/Peppy.doc Wiki * GitHub
 
I've been doing a little more experimenting with the Tinker Board, WiFi, and a multichannel USB soundcard and I thought I would share my experiences for those who are looking for a platform for DSP audio work that is a little more capable than the Raspberry Pi.

I need a multichannel DAC that meets certain criteria, and would also like to have a couple of ADC channels for audio input. I've turned to pro audio recording interfaces with a USB interface. Since I want to use 6 or 8 output channels and a couple of input channels simultaneously I need a good implementation of the USB bus on my SBC hardware. I also stream audio over WiFi to my systems, and typically this has been via a USB WiFi dongle. In addition I am synchronizing the system clock with a master clock over WiFi using NTP, so I need a good quality WiFi connection to get the tightest level of synchronization possible.

How does this relate to the Tinker board, you might ask? Well unlike the Pi, where both USB and wired ethernet run through the same interface chip, the tinker board has separate and independent USB 2.0 and gigabit ethernet controllers. With the tinkerboard, I noticed that I could get very good synchronization (jitter <20microsec) over ethernet, but over WiFi the jitter increased almost 10x and that was not acceptable. So I hatched a plan to use a WiFi range extender (Netgear EX3700) as a WiFi dongle that is connected via the ethernet port. I was very happy to see that the synchronization over WiFi using that means of connection was just about as good as with ethernet.

When I proceeded to load the USB bus with work, the level of synchronization did not change. I did this by running the unit with all 6 input channels and all 10 output channels simultaneously carrying 24bit/96kHz audio. All good!

My previous experience with the Netgear EX3700 is that it has superior range and signal sensitivity/quality compared to the best USB WiFi dongles that I have used. It has two external movable antennas and is dual band (g and n). There are similar models with a/b/g/n/ac to fit your budget. This means I can locate my remote system pretty much anywhere in my home and have a great WiFi connection for audio and NTP. These things are a better-performing alternative to the more common USB adapter, albeit at about twice the cost.

In general, he new Tinker OS release seems pretty solid and an improvement over the previous one. The Tinker Board seems to be a good option for audio work and it has a couple of times the computing power of the Pi 3. When you are trying to processing multichannel audio in real time on a low-power, general computing platform that was not really designed for audio, a little bit extra hardware performance is welcome!
 
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Thanks, I guess I'll just have to jump in and try.
The TB isn't that expensive, but it is my only one :)
You meant Volumio when you mentioned vlc or are you running vlc on the TB?
I use Volumio, in the settings you can just select 'SPDIF' as output device on the TB.

Late reply but I've been running mine this way (SPDIF & GND header to MiniDSP MiniDigi). It works and sounds great with both Android and TinkerOS
 
In general, he new Tinker OS release seems pretty solid and an improvement over the previous one. The Tinker Board seems to be a good option for audio work and it has a couple of times the computing power of the Pi 3. When you are trying to processing multichannel audio in real time on a low-power, general computing platform that was not really designed for audio, a little bit extra hardware performance is welcome!

Just looping back to this as I'm starting to move towards my digital xo project over the rest of my backlog -- I know there was some initial complaints about the Tinker OS that seems to have been eliminated, but I'm wondering if you're finding the functionality all that you'd need to dump out to a USB multichannel card (I'll probably use the XMOS USB to multi-I2s) working well and no trouble with ecasound/SoX/etc.

Have plenty of experience with Linux, but not on these small board so just making sure I won't run into missing functionality.
 
Just looping back to this as I'm starting to move towards my digital xo project over the rest of my backlog -- I know there was some initial complaints about the Tinker OS that seems to have been eliminated, but I'm wondering if you're finding the functionality all that you'd need to dump out to a USB multichannel card (I'll probably use the XMOS USB to multi-I2s) working well and no trouble with ecasound/SoX/etc.

Have plenty of experience with Linux, but not on these small board so just making sure I won't run into missing functionality.

When I used the Tinker Board with a 6-ch-in, 8-ch-out USB audio interface everything seemed to work fine in testing. This was with ecasound as the crossover and for routing audio I/O.

The only time I experienced a problem was when I tried to replace a Raspberry Pi with the Tinker board in an application where I stream audio from another computer to the client (Pi or Tinker) over WiFi using gstreamer pipelines. In this role, the Tinker board had occasional and repeated audio dropouts. My guess is that perhaps the ALSA loopback card (which was needed) is not well implemented, or there are some ethernet releated I/O problems with streaming content. I gave up after an hour of testing some different hardware with the Tinkerboard and then put the Pi back.

Otherwise, it seems pretty good! The USB interface seems to work very well, and I would assume that your XMOS card should work just fine. I am using the "latest" OS from tinkerboarding.co.uk, which I think is release 2.0.4 (Debian based). I will try again when the next OS release is available.
 
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