Hi. I’m Carl Franz. I’m currently living in a little farming community on the far southern outskirts of Chicago, Illinois, USA.
I’ve been in technology for 35 years on pretty much every Mainframe, Mid-Frame, Mini and Micro computer you can imagine. I’ve also been building Speakers, Tube amps, and Tube Pre-Amps for a bunch of years.
My musical likes run from
- Classical (more modern, think Dvořák, Debussy, Copeland, Ravel etc.),
- Jazz (Oscar Peterson, Miles Davis, etc.),
- Orchestral Rock (Pink Floyd, Yes, ELP, Renaissance, et. al.),
- add to that Clannod, Steeleye Span (spelled correctly), Joe Jackson, Neal Schon, Nightwish and other weirdness.
Also, I have something like 1000 record albums (I knew exactly before the divorce ). You know, the round black disks with music in the grooves (ask the older folks, they can tell you… )
I’m running:
- Volumio 2.175 on a
- Raspberry Pi 2 B+
- 32GB Sandisk thumb drive (when it works )
- with a HiFiBerry DAC+ Pro Hat
- through a hand made 8 watt Tube P-P amp
- into an outstanding pair of Dynaco A10 Speakers.
Sadly, I’ve found the Dynaco A10 speakers superior for playing Jazz than anything I’ve yet hand designed and built (about 10 different speaker designs).
I tried the Raspberry Pi 3 but found that the on board WiFi messes with the DAC and visa versa. I may try it with some of the USB DACs I’ve got hanging around and see if that works.
Right now my biggest problem is it won’t scan the thumb drive for music. It did and then it didn’t. I got into the Raspberry via SSH and SFTP and can see the drive and music and the permissions flags are all 777 so it’s not a security issue. Annoying since it was working well for about a week and then there were some weirdness with the catalog (I ask for Lauren Pickford and get INXS).
Have fun all.