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Raspberry Pi as a streamer into a quad vena 2?

O

ossy

pfm Member
Hi, I’ve been experimenting using my iphone/dragonfly red/tidal wired into my quad vena amp. Sounds good, but my work surface pro laptop straight into the vena using the amp’s own built in dac sounds even better!

So, I am after a streamer that can stream tidal controlled by my phone but it doesn’t need a dac as the amps dac sounds fabulous.

Am I right in thinking that I can buy a raspberry pi4, load volumio, and then control this from my phone? It looks easy ish from Darko’s website but am new to all this. Also, is this going to sound as good as from the surface pro laptop?

Many thanks, i am sure this has all been asked before but all help appreciated
 
I did use a dragonfly as an experiment but found it was better suited to headphone listening and was a little disappointing in a stereo set up. It’s likely the Dac that is the issue here. I bought a Dac hat for the Pi and it was better.
 
That should work. I'd recommend moOde over Volume for reliability and features. The RPi USB should work through your DAC's USB input but I'd recommend getting a cheap 'digi' hat so you can connect to the DAC via coax or optical. HifiBerry make these hats starting around £20 IIRC. Some people have said using USB straight from the RPi can be noisy if the DAC doesn't isolate the digital and analog sides sufficiently.
 
At the mo, using the surface pro wired to the vena via the usb A socket, I am getting crackling every so often when playing tidal. What’s causing this?
 
Quite a few additional processes going on in your laptop, diverting the CPU and memory usage. Mostly these will have no effect on any sound output, but if the USB port you are using has a shared bus with something else, you can get glitches.
I use a Rpi3 with dac hat in one system due to the ethernet and USB sharing the same bus, causing glitches (you could use a SPDIF hat with your amp), but have a barebones Rpi4 into my dac via USB in the main system as the 4 has two separate buses.
 
I have installed a rasberry pi4 with a JustBoom digihat - took all of 15 minutes to set up and get running (and I know very little about computers, just good at following instructions!). I am using volumio to stream Tidal to the dac in my amp. Sounds good!

Is there anything else I should be taking into consideration to maximise the sound quality?
 
ossy said:
I have installed a rasberry pi4 with a JustBoom digihat - took all of 15 minutes to set up and get running (and I know very little about computers, just good at following instructions!). I am using volumio to stream Tidal to the dac in my amp. Sounds good!

Is there anything else I should be taking into consideration to maximise the sound quality?
Click to expand...

No, all the bits are getting where they need to if the music is playing. Enjoy it! And try to be at least a little skeptical if someone gushes about cables, reclockers, ethernet regenerators, etc.
 
FWIW, I’m using a 4GB Raspberry Pi4 straight into a Quad Artera Play+. Standard Pi power supply. Certified USB cable from Supra. All sounds fab to me! And I use Moode which has proven to be extremely reliable and easy to use. SSD hard drive plugged directly into the Pi (though into a USB2 socket, as there was some issues with certain HDs and USB3, so if you find any sudden disconnects use USB2 for now, though likely fixed on the newer production Pis). Lastly, ignore anyone who says you need an expensive streamer for best results - utter hogwash! :)
 
booja30 said:
No, all the bits are getting where they need to if the music is playing. Enjoy it! And try to be at least a little skeptical if someone gushes about cables, reclockers, ethernet regenerators, etc.
Click to expand...

My coax cable doesn’t have arrows on it though, how do i know if it’s connected the right way round ? ;)
 
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