I want to build a media player by using Volumio on raspberry pi. I will probably mainly use it as DLNA renderer together with the amazing android app Bubbleupnp.
Now I see a lot of posts on the forum where people claim to have difficulties using the new Pi 2 B with volumio. OS crashes and other stability issues. I guess this is just because it’s still new. But I am wondering if I should buy the 2 version or just the B+ version which already works stable. I can’t imagine I need the extra power on the 2 just for audio playback.
I intend to use the berry together with a hifiberry dac+ and a WiFi dongle with RT5370 chipset, which should work on raspbian.
I don’t really mind paying 8.- extra for the 2, but if I never use it it’s still “wasted” money unless I tend to use it for something else in the future…
I am using Volumio 1.55 on a Pi 2 B (1GB) and it is working quite well. I have an Edimax wifi dongle which is supported without any additional driver.
As I’m using the HDMI sound output, I have recompiled a kernel to support higher rates than 48kHz (even if I have zero hi-res files!) but I can not tell if the combi Pi2+HifiBerry Dac is stable.
Know what you mean, but I first want to try things out, see how it works. I can always buy a digi+ card and a dac later. I don’t even have good speakers for my receiver yet… I know which ones I want, but I will spend my money slowly building a nice HiFi setup…
If your current receiver (and the one on your ‘I will buy that one if I have the money’ list) already has digital inputs, than it has a D/A Converter inside. Using a Digi(+) you can feed the receiver digitally and use the receivers DAC. This way you can later add a seperate DAC if you feel a higher quality DAC is meedeed (it will improve sound quality over a simple RPi I2S DAC).
Yes I am aware that this would be possible, however I have quite an old receiver without any DAC inside. A Philips FR930E stereo receiver which still works perfectly and I really want to keep until it fails. Whenever I want to upgrade I can simply use this Pi with DAC+ at another room with monitor speaker setup.