Pi 4B/2GB on the back of a 7" Pi screen
USB out directly into the input on my Cambridge Audio Azur 751R Receiver.
Monitor Audio Silver 500 speakers.
Decent (but not fancy) vintage Yamaha turntable, Fosi Audio X4 phono preamp with volume/treble/bass. It has lil vac tubes, doubt they do much, but the thing works so no complaints.
My best vinyl is a Freddie Hubbard 2LP Paris set, fantastic recording. Most of my vinyl is bargain bin or thrift rescues.
The guitars are Ibanez (jazz semi-hollow) and Takamine (jumbo acoustic) if anyone cares.
In general, a Raspberry Pi 3 is powerful enough to run Volumio, especially when paired with a DAC HAT. However, if you plan to use a USB DAC, it’s advisable to use a Raspberry Pi 4, as on a Raspberry Pi 3, both the Ethernet (ETH0) and USB share the same BUS. If your intention is to stream high-resolution audio, a Raspberry Pi 4 with 2GB of RAM would better accommodate this
The box on the right in the picture.
RPi4-4GB
GeekWorm DACPi Dac hat (PCM5122) comes with a nice metal case
27W RPi Power Adaptor (borrowed from RPi 5)
Boot from TeamGroup 256GB USB 3.2 Gen 2
All Naim gear
Spendor S6s
Just be honest with her (and maybe with yourself), tell her it’s an addiction and if you stop buying stuff and setting up your equipment and tuning your hi-fi, you’ll just die. You’ll just freaking die.
lol they’re Gallo Acoustics’ Strada 2’s in a line array config, and TR3D subwoofers. The pylons ( ) are just shy of 9’ tall. Old photo - rear wiring is mucho tidy nowadays.
It’s not the sound everyone will want at home, but I’m still looking for the person who doesn’t love it.
Re: @backenst ‘s question why Pi3, I used it with Volumio before I had Pi4’s. Agree with @Wheaten the 4 works better for USB out, but my 3 only has momentary blips when changing tracks - I play only local files.
Nice @Bigguy2018 Excellent set up. Have you noticed performance differences from the various Pi, in particular the Pi5, do you find that it is much faster than the others?
For Volumio playback all three Pis work fine. The Pi3 is a bit slow to respond sometimes.
The Pi5 in twice as fast as the Pi4 when copying files, browsing and indexing large libraries.
All three DACs are very close, audio quality wise, with the DAC2 HD best by a little bit.
The goal was to get clear but full bodied sound that is as close as possible to the artists’ visions, given the budgetary constraints of being poor.
Pi4 with a Pi2AES hat
A MiniDSP Flex is on the preamp/DAC duties. Here I dial in the crossover, time delays, PEQ, and subwoofer routing for basic room correction. It comes with a Dirac license but in my experience it sounds better without it.
The amplification is done by a barebones build of Hypex NCx500 that has no characteristics.
I live in a big dirty city with garbage electrical infrastructure, so I use Allo Nirvana and iFi SMPS to hopefully clean it up a bit.
This setup, at least to my ears, sounds ‘honest’ with no color or character. Thx.
) are just shy of 9’ tall. Old photo - rear wiring is mucho tidy nowadays.
