DAC Output Qualities

[ganzup]

Hi all,

At home i use many Squeezeplugs Clients.
As there is no more Squeezebox Touch available i like to pimp up one of my PIs for HiRes Audio.
To buy the ‘Right’ component i like to know some things…

1. Is The HDMI Output of The pi as worse as the Audio Jack? (Heard- with a patched kernel up to 192khz is possible)
2. Should i use digital (optical or coax) or analogue to hook up my onkyo 805? Are there differences if the DAC provides the analogue output or if my onkyo parses the digital signal?
3. any known Quality issues - wolfson vs hifiberry…?

Thanks in advance

George

[tyres2]

@ganzup

Hi all,

1. Is The HDMI Output of The pi as worse as the Audio Jack? (Heard- with a patched kernel up to 192khz is possible)

From what I’ve heard the HDMI output is supposed to be pretty good (on the Pi), certainly better than the analogue jack Not sure how you’d feed it into your Onkyo though, unless via a TV, which is a bit unsatisfactory if you just want to listen to music. Unless your Onkyo has an HDMI input (which I guess it might).

@ganzup

2. Should i use digital (optical or coax) or analogue to hook up my onkyo 805? Are there differences if the DAC provides the analogue output or if my onkyo parses the digital signal?
3. any known Quality issues - wolfson vs hifiberry…?

I don’t think the Wolfson has an optical output. I’m using the coaxial SPDIF output, which seems pretty good (into my Onkyo network cd-receiver).

I’ve not tried the HifiBerry, but there is a comment in the Element14 forums that does a comparison of the two cards, and seems to favour the Wolfson in terms of sound quality, but rates the HifiBerry in terms of (current) driver support element14.com/community/mess … ate#109592