Has anyone tried the 'Wolfson audio card' i2s DAC??

Hi,

I’ve got a raspberry pi, playing flac files from an external USB hard drive through a USB DAC (a Beringer UCA202) and am very happy with it. I still get some VERY minor glitches in the music now & again. From reading around it seems that these tiny imperfections may well be due to the design of the Pi itself and the USB bus struggling so I won’t bother trying to ‘fix’ them, instead I’m thinking of trying an i2s DAC soon.

Of course I’ve seen the Hifiberry but that requires soldering headers onto the Pi and I’ve only got the use of one arm so soldering & the like can be a bit hit & miss - I’d rather avoid it if I can!

My favoured option is the Wolfson Audio Card that’s designed so that it connects to the P5 header CONTACTS on the Pi’s circuit board without the need for the actual P5 headers to be soldered in place! Here’s the link:

element14.com/community/comm … wolfson_pi

Has anyone got any experience of these & do they sound any good?

Will it work with the drivers etc in volumio?

There’s a fair bit of into on enabling the i2s for the Hifiberry - enable i2s support in volumio then make a tweak ‘etc/modules’ so that it refers to the Hifiberry with ‘snd_soc_hifiberry_dac’ - it’s unlikely that line would be the same for the Wolfson card, does anyone know what it should be or how I can find out myself if I get one??

Thanks!!

Oops, I should have read up a bit more thoroughly, the installation guide for the Wolfson audio card states that “The use of USB hubs with Raspberry pi and the Wolfson audio card is not recommended” - a USB hub is needed to power the USB HDD where I store all my music!

It looks like I’ll be going down the Hifiberry route!!

On the USB hub front, you have the HDD hooked into a hub to power it? I reckon the Wolfson advice is more general than that. Having lots of USB traffic seems to glitch out the PI quite often.

Hi Ken,

The Wolfson card needs a special kernel, the driver is not included in the normale Raspberry PI kernel. About soldering the header on the Raspberry: Do you somebody that could help? It is not very hard to do. The HiFIBerry DAC is now also available fully soldered, which means you only have to solder the header on the Raspberry.

Best regards
Daniel