I’ve been using raspberry pi’ as XBMC media centres for a while now and I now want to try Volumio as a music streamer.
A question I have is can audio streams be output over HDMI to a suitable receiver? I realise using a suitable DAC would be preferential but I’d like to play around first before I start buying new kit.
A lot of top end Blu-Ray / universal disc players now have 2 hdmi outputs - 1 for video the other just for audio streams. My thinking is that my Denon receiver can take 192khz / 24bit streams and decode them so the HDMI port may be ok?
Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated.
Also if hdmi is usable would it be possible to output multi channel DSD files through this method?
Please mind that Pi’s HDMI output is limited to 16/48… So no hi-res tunes through it… Your best bet is an USB DAC, or better a i2s DAC (they sound really good for the price)
thanks for getting back to me. i’ve tried it using the HDMI connection as temporary measure and i’ve gotta say it sounds great compared to various XBMC versions I’ve tried. I’m gonna order the Hifiberry next.
@Michaelangelo: previous to Volumio I had XMBC installed connected via HDMI to my Rotel Digital PreAmp. I am quite sure the amp displayed 88.2k, 96k and 192k when playing the appropriate tracks, therefore I wonder if there is really a hardware limit of the Raspberry.
I’ve used my rasp to play hi-res files (up to 192k) over HDMI with Openelec, I don’t think the hdmi on the rasp is limited to low-res files. On volumio though I get pop/clicks when playing hi-res files but they still play and denon receiver sees them as 24/192 files.