PiFi china clones of the HifiBerry

Hello to all

I found clones of the HifiBerry that are almost half the price.
PiFi DAC+ fasttech.com/products/1/100 … nboard-for
PiFi DiGi+ fasttech.com/products/1/100 … -to-s-pdif

Dose any one have any expiriance with this dacs ?

Best regards,
Pedro

Hi!

I’m using PiFi Digi, no problems with it, but i had no chance to compare it to hifiberry one. Looks like main components are the same (wolfson chip), but i’m not sure if boards are equal.

Alexey.

I used both: the Hifiberry Dac and the PiFi Dac on a raspberry B+ with Volumio 2 RC1
I can not hear any difference between the two, playing over my NAD D3020 amplifier and MB Quart 800 speakers.
I am now using the Hifiberry Dac, because i paid the most for it, so it must be the best, right? :wink:

1 Like

Hi All,

I have bought a PiFi Digi V1.1 from Dx.com to install on my Raspberry Pi type B. I have tried everything from Volumio, Rune, MusicBox, but I can’t get it working. I have tried al the settings, drivers, and running now Volumio 1.55 but no sound… :cry: The LED is working and I think I did the soldering on P5 correctly.

If I set the output to HDMI, it works normally…

UPDATE 1: I installed Volumio 2 RC2 and now the PiFi Digi is working (!), but the DLNA and AirPlay won’t but at least I get sound of it. Don’t know why it works now and thats frustrating as well :wink:

UPDATE 2: I’ back on Volumio 1.55 and selected I2S driver: HifiBerry Digi but with Audio Output I can only select ALSA. I would expect that I should be able to select HifiBerry Digi here as well? :unamused:

Any thoughts? Please help me get the PiFi Digi working.

Thanks!

Ewoud

This may solve your problems with the DAC. I do not own one of the clones now (it’s on its way from eBay), but I found these guides which should also apply to the PiFi 2.0 DAC as far as I know. The instructions are different based on what kernel you are running. This may explain the unexpected behavior after upgrading.

Kernel 3.12.x
hifiberry.com/guides/hifibe … iguration/

Kernel 3.18.x
hifiberry.com/guides/config … ux-3-18-x/

By the way, did your DAC come with spacers to mount it on the Raspberry Pi board?

Even though this thread is somewhat old I’d like to report about the Pifi Digi+.

I have one running on a RPi 2 for roughly a year now and it works flawlessly on Raspbian, OSMC and Openelec. :sunglasses: To me the combination of added IR receiver for ¹/₃ of a Hifiberry’s price definately cuts the deal.

Configuration is dead simple: Plug in the board, add 2 lines to the config.txt and reboot. The config varies depending on the kernel version.

On current Debian Jesse (=Raspbian) it’s:

dtoverlay=hifiberry-digi
dtoverlay=lirc-rpi:gpio_in_pin=26

On OSMC it’s:

dtoverlay=hifiberry-digi-overlay
dtoverlay=lirc-rpi:gpio_in_pin=26

On older Debian (Wheezy) and Openelec 6 it’s:

dtoverlay=hifiberry-digi
dtoverlay=lirc-rpi,gpio_in_pin=26

Mind the minimal, but crucial change. It is only a question of comma vs. collon, but it makes the difference between working and not. Took me a couple hours to get it right the first time. :laughing:

BTW my Pifi didn’t come with spacers, but the required large case did.

1 Like

The moderator of LibreELEC forum made the following comment :

manicam wrote:

"Dear LibreELEC support,

I am using LibreELEC 7.0.2 with RPi 2 and the poor audio output from the HDMI output from a low-end Samsung TV

In order to improve the quality of sound I purchased the PiFi DAC v2.0. This seems to be a Chinese clone of the HiFiBerry DAC Plus.

I wish to seek your advice on how I can enable the PiFi DAC to work with the RPi 2 and channel the analog audio output to my audio system.

Thank you."

The moderator, Irusak, wrote:

You complain about the poor audio quality via hdmi (which I don’t agree, I think the audio is great) yet you buy a cheap Chinese knock off? Hmmm.

Hi,

I’ve just ordered a pifi/hifi digi+ from DX for a pi b+. I’m wanting to use volumio on it. Do I just use the hifiberry digi+ i2s configuration in the settings to get it to work or do I need to do some programming etc.

Thanks :confused:

Slight necrobump but HDMI audio is the exact same bitstream as i2s audio - just folded into the TMDS signal that carries the video (and CEI, and usb-over-hdmi, and ethernet-over-hdmi, etc)

That’s why you can get boxes that combine single-channel DVI-D with SPDIF into an HDMI output. Or the reverse. They work great, and they don’t mangle the data streams at all. They just fold them together or separate them.

Hi everybody

I used to use the PiFi without issues, controlling the volume too.
today I upgraded to latest version and volume control seems to be broken.
I’m using “HIFIBerry DAC Plus” setup as Audio Peripheral and DAC Model too.

Anybody has the same issue?

EDIT:
Solved. Found a fix for the bug introduced in latest update
see problem-with-volume-t13504-40.html

what pifi dac are you using ? how can it configure in volumio ?

thanks

Hi,

I have received from AliExpress my bought PiFi Dac v1.0 to mount on my Raspberry Pi Model B.

I don’t get sound with settings set to HifiBerry DAC.
The led on the PiFi is blinking and I see my dac listed when running aplay -l from the cli.

In essence there can be two issues why I don’t get sound:

Below the 26 pins on the RPi there are other 8 “pins” which are not covered by the PiFi DAC. Header P5 in this image: https://www.elektronik-kompendium.de/sites/raspberry-pi/bilder/19052514.jpg
Do I have to do something with that?

What settings do I need to get sound from the PiFi DAC v1.0?

Thanks in advance,
John

Raspberry Pi Model B does not have the I2S signals exposed on GPIO (the missing 8 pins not covered by the HAT), that’s why the HAT does not work.

If you are good with soldering you can connect those missing signals from the RPi to the HAT with some wires

I bought this PiFi DAC+ v2.0 from AliExpress
https://www.aliexpress.com/snapshot/0.html?spm=a2g0s.9042647.0.0.6d374c4d3EtoDb&orderId=8132811645466300&productId=4001341312450

I’m using it with a Raspberry Pi 4B (2GB). When I booted it up I2S DAC was automatically selected (ON), and the DAC Model was HiFiBerry Amp2.

It seems to work fine. I’ll have to dig a bit more into whether there is some tuning that is necessary.