advertisement


Off grid rpi dac

Alan, the guts of it are the fifopi board. Ess Dacs usually run a 100kHz clock and resync everything internally. With the dual clocks on the fifopi you can run in true sync mode using a local master clock to provide the timing. The idea is that it lets you run a crappy source like the rpi without issue, that side of things certainly seems to work. The Iv stage does seem to suffer a bit with hf noise from the dac board which was coupling into the opamps, the extra filtering and different opamps have really cleaned that up.

There's still some way to go, supercaps on the rails on the dac board and possibly adding a reg on the avec as well as the better clocks.
Thanks Si, have to get mine up and running

Alan
 
46948208505_639d8be8a6.jpg

Opamps are socketed...
 
Last edited:
Si I only have a RPI 3B / Audiophonics Sabre V3 and a amplifier board which I cant remember the name of right now
I was refering to your RPI dac set up it seems to be growing

Alan
 
It's the same size it was out of the box, but it will end up with at least one extra reg supply on it, maybe 3.
 
Treated the dac board to some love today, supercapped each rail. Sound quality has nose dived currently.
 
Treated the dac board to some love today, supercapped each rail. Sound quality has nose dived currently.

What do you mean by supercapping Si? Additional uF? IME it normally takes a couple of hours, and gets incrementally better thereafter
 
Yup, big ass 1.5f caps right at the load. It takes 10 minutes for the leds to go out after I disconnect it now.
 
|Sadly I'm getting all sorts of ****ery out of this now. it won't work at all with upgraded clocks, drops out, stutters, loses wifi- whihc is just plain weird. No doubt I've done something wrong, and it was sounding so fine.
 
So take it round to misterdogs and it works fine. His router is six inches from his hifi rack though. So I've bought a repeater, which will sit 6 inches from my dac and connect via short cat5.

Currently loading music to ssd.
 
Based on Paul's at his house it's one of the best dacs I've heard. I suspect itll run a fully regged buffalo 9038 close, though I bet the mercury is a better iv.

It sounds just as good at mine, when it's worked. A fun project, but its 600 quid all in, almost 800 if you include ssd and interface board.
 
All working flawlessly now. Just struggling with getting files onto ntfs ssd from exfat hd and mac hd in laptop, lots of double copying.
 
Finally sorted, dumped Volumio for Moode. Drive scanned in about 3 minutes, artwork found and downloaded. Web interface is rock solid and it sounds perfect.

I may even splurge for the Lundahl output trannies now.
 
Few more mods. Split the psu to the dac board added 3.3v regs for avcc and another for vcca, dvcc runs off it's own battery rail and local supercap. Swapped the opa1612 iv board for a transformer version and fitted a pair of lundahl 1674s.

It sounds splendid. Utterly grain free and with better bass texture and differentiation than I've ever had. Frankly I didnt know the ns1000m were this good in the bass.

Its shit ugly though.
 


advertisement


Back
Top