I just found this DAC Board for the Raspberry Pi B+ and wanted to ask if someone has bought one of these.
Are there anyexperiences? Or should i test it?
It seems to be quite a good price (22€/USD) for the components. It uses the same chip as the hifiberry DAC+ board. But i dont really know if there are any working driver for this?
Data:
1.Sampling Frequency:384KHz
2.Resolution (Bits) :16-32
3.Digital Audio Interface :I2S
4.SNR :120dB
5.THD:-93dB
6. Dynamic range :112dB
7.Supports Raspberry Pi B+, Raspberry Pi 2 Model B
Go and buy the original PCM5122 based IQaudIO Pi-DAC+ and feel good that you are supporting those that put the effort / time and money into having the original drivers / linux changes and put the engineering effort into these products in the first place RATHER than these clones / rip off.
There must be 4 or 5 clone cards out there now. If they had one ounce of originality they would have selected an alternative chipset and brought something else to market. It’s not as though the TI PCM5122 is the only DAC out there.
I’m sure Michelangelo and others feels similar about their software.
If you look carefully, the link shows a iqaudio dac in picture but the brand is iqandio… Not sure you will receive what you expect.,. And it is written made in UK on the dac shown…
Aside from different makes of DACs I find that providing a gain stage (pre-preamplifier if you like, with gain of about12dB) for the analog signal passing immediately after the the DAC, produces a much richer and more organic listening experience compared to listening without it.
In any case beyond equipment downstream of a DAC I have come across only a handful of listening rooms in the home environment which are properly dimensioned, with appropriate furnishing and wall finishes that are able to produce a really proper sound in the home.
One such listening room was totally enclosed, made of brick walls with crackle cement finish and absorbent room corner treatment and with dimensions 24.5 feet long, 16 feet wide and 8 feet high.
Don’t think I’m an audiophile but the topic pushes buttons…
I struggle to control my hifi tendencies, and eventually, after sitting quietly and thinking for a while, I don’t buy a very expensive piece of kit. The issue is that the “real world” (whatever that is to you) has music that is so transformed for convenience that it bears little relationship to how it was performed. You don’t get to hear the French horn player emptying the spit out of his instrument onto the patch of newspaper next to him, you don’t hear the restart when the string section was having a laugh, you don’t notice the bass player having a hissy fit because the drummer tweeted nastily about her.
An ‘ideal listening room’? To hear what electronic kit can reproduce of a pile of recordings mixed into one by an engineer, then downmixed to a popular distribution medium (CD, say) and then played on kit that may, or may not, do a reasonable job? The whole thing leads me to realise that an awful lot of my cravings for ‘better sound’ are fallacious and what I really desire is ‘enjoyable’ sound. I fully appreciate that Rob Watt’s thinking on why his design philosophy re DACs is probably the Right Thing but I can’t justify the latest Chord Electronics kit, much though I’d like the opportunity. The whole law of diminishing returns really bites when it comes to sound reproduction; 10x the outlay provides a 10% improvement at each step, and very quickly everything else in the environment becomes a limiting factor, me included…
wow . Good post chris, I would probably put myself in the same boat as you, but I respect that others have the money/inclination/ear to do things otherwise. Made me smile anyway
Certainly it is inconceivable to have Bayreuth Opernhaus in ones room or Stadt Teater Munchen but I guess to be able to listen to good and great music one could strive to assemble an ‘optimum level’ audio system even if it is by using the raspberry pi/dac at the upstream and decent downstream amplification and loudsoeakers but importantly placing them in an appropriate listening room.
And then forgetting about all the equipment and everything else and soaking in the Bach Cello Suites or Wagner Tannhauser or Stravinsky Pulcinella.
. Good post chris, I would probably put myself in the same boat as you, but I respect that others have the money/inclination/ear to do things otherwise. Made me smile anyway 
