Streamers Recommendations

[bluesman]

On 6/17/2020 at 10:09 AM, audiobomber said:

 

I have the sMS-200 and a Raspberry Pi 3B+.

Ahh - now I understand why you’re so down on a Pi.  You’re basing your opinion on the last generation.  The 4 has true gigabit Ethernet, excellent ac WiFi, separate buses for USB and networking, USB 3, and improved power management.  It outperforms the 3B+ on almost all benchmarks by at least a factor of 2.  On many, it performs as much as 4 times better (see my own performance test results and the linked web tests in my Value Proposition articles about the Pi).  
 

With 4 gigs of RAM onboard and zram installed, there’s no SQ degradation from hitting performance limits, even with DSD.  A Pi 4 sounds mighty good to many of us with a variety of software.  It’ll even run a full JRiver Media Center instance as fast and well as an entry level laptop or desktop PC. And the many lighter players like Rune, Volumio, etc are really slick on a 4.

 

I think it’s an excellent choice for a streamer.  And you can buy 7 of them for the price of even a Neo.  An Ultra will set you back far more.

[bluesman]

57 minutes ago, Mike Rubin said:

Might be a bit off-topic, but we are talking about streaming.  Are Rune and Volumio capable of serving a DLNA stream over an ethernet connection in addition to playing over their USB outputs? 

Yes - the internet radio streaming works great.  And DLNA also works, although you may have to do a bit of configuring on some platforms.  Here’s a link to the Volumio KB page telling you how to stream to it.  The Rune forum also has many threads about DLNA / UPnP streaming to it.

[bluesman]

2 hours ago, Mike Rubin said:

Clicking on the link shows that you can stream TO Volumio as a renderer using DLNA, but I don't see at first glance that you can stream FROM it as a server. 

Yes you can.  With Volumio 1.X, it was apparently built in.  Here's a LINK to a good instruction page for setting up Volumio as a DLNA server using MiniDLNA, which is easy to install with the command apt-get install minidlna.  Here's a LINK to a simple instruction page if you're running a Debian distro and here's a LINK if you're running Ubuntu.  AFAIK, BubbleUPnP does the same thing as minidlna.  Again, I've not tried this myself with Volumio, although I do use Bubble with JRiver to stream to multiple Chromecasts on my WLAN

[bluesman]

38 minutes ago, audiobomber said:

The comparisons I found all say the older, simpler Raspberries sound better.

I assume from this comment that you haven’t actually heard and compared them yourself.

 

I own and regularly use 7 Pis, 2 of which are 4s and 3 of which are 3B+s.  I also have a ZeroW and a 3B.  Driving the same DACs (of which I have 5 good 2 channel units plus one fair to middlin’ 6 in/8 out), the 4s sound cleaner, clearer, more detailed and more dynamic playing Redbook flacs and DSD than the stock 3.  My overclocked (yes, you can overclock a 3B+ in a few ways) zrammed, cooled 3B+s sound better than stock and almost as good as the stock, cooled 4 gig 4s on easy files (24/96 flacs, DSD64).  
 

When pushed to its limits, a 3B+ sounds as I describe above, especially if it heats up enough to throttle the CPU.  Add the demands of a fancy GUI, eg JRiver Media Center, and a 3B is out of its league.  You can hear this almost like it’s running out of headroom.  It gets grainy and compressed.  The stock 4 in a cooled case has more horsepower, so it handles the load with less strain - and it sounds great.  And an overclocked, cooled 4 with zram, optimized RAM use (minimal GPU, adequate swap if needed, etc), and a USB3 SSD instead of a microSD plays beautifully enough to satisfy most critical but practical audiophiles.

 

Try it - you might like it.