Support for Playback Designs DACs

A friend of mine loaned me his Playback Designs MPD-3 DAC for a few days and I got it working through the coaxial output of my Squeezebox Touch. The sound is phenomenal, a huge improvement over my HRT MusicStreamer II+. Unfortunately, I can’t drive the MPD-3 with Volumio 1.55 on my Raspberry Pi B+. The DAC is recognized and I can send audio to it, but it’s incredibly distorted, in that digital distortion kind of way.

I contacted the DAC’s designer, Andreas Koch, and here was his recommendation:

It appears Volumio includes ALSA version k3.18.5+:

Any idea what I should do next to try to get this DAC working with Volumio? I don’t have the background to build my own custom version of Linux, and I assume I can’t just do a simple package install of the latest ALSA driver from the above link.