2nd Iteration on Streaming via ROON/HQPlayer

[Miska]

19 hours ago, digitaldufferme said:

Thank you for this, just what I need...a Pi user with experience of more expensive servers. Really good to know that the Pi will not be a limitation on streaming to my DAC which is designed with an excellent USB input. I treat streamers as appliances: set and forget if possible so the UI is not much of an issue for me so long as it does the job.

 

My NAA images are certainly intended for that category. You flash it to microSD, and then boot up Pi4 (forget Pi3) from it and that's it, it is ready for use. It doesn't have any UI because it doesn't need any. It is as minimal and stripped down as possible.

 

[Miska]

33 minutes ago, Cebolla said:

Interesting - exactly what's missing on the RPi 3 that requires using the RPi 4 for the NAA. Would it be better to use the 4GB RAM version of the RPi 4, for example?

 

It is the screwed up hardware design that causes lost USB microframes especially on higher rates like 705.6/768k PCM and DSD512 when ethernet is active simultaneously with USB. This is hardware design fault that plagues all RasPi's prior to 4. IOW, a bit too much cost cutting on all fronts.

 

Even though the earlier RasPi SoC had Ethernet controller on chip (IIRC), they instead used very cheap USB-connected ethernet controller on the same USB bus where the USB connector is connected to. This causes USB transfer glitches when both are operating at higher bandwidths. This problem doesn't exist if you use a DAC board like HifiBerry connected to the I2S bus, thus avoiding using USB for audio.

 

In the end the glitch sounds like having small dust particles on vinyl.

 

[Miska]

3 hours ago, digitaldufferme said:

@Miska Please excuse what may be a daft question but if I use your NAA, does the pi still do it's streaming job as normal if i decide to just go through ROON temporarily or do I have to swap cards on the Pi 4 using another OS if I want to do that? ie if I'm not using HQP for upsamplng/filtering.

 

Yes, you need to swap SD cards. My image is a single purpose one and works only with HQPlayer.