I have had this dac for a month and in terms of sound quality it is perfect for me, but I have the following problem:
I am currently using the stereo minijack output from headphones to RCA, since my amplifier only has RCA, the problem I have is that the music is heard in the background on the rest of the inputs on my amplifier when I select them. I don’t know what this is due to, perhaps a grounding problem on the minijack output?
Just wanted to share my feedback on this brilliant piece of hardware — I’ve already picked up two of them
They’re both powered independently via LPS, deliberately bypassing the RPi5’s 5V rail to maintain a pristine signal path.
Running Volumio V4.015, and with a few surgical tweaks to /boot/userconfig.txt, I’m now streaming up to DSD1024 DoP (PCM) via I²S. It’s rock solid!
config.txt
dtoverlay=allo-katana-dac-audio
# Add your custom config.txt options to this file, which will be preserved during updates
hdmi_blanking=2
dtparam=audio=off
# CPU always full power
force_turbo=1
arm_freq=2400
gpu_freq=750
max_usb_current=1
dtparam=spi=off
dtparam=uart=off
volumio@rpi5-ws840:~$ cat /var/log/mpd.log^
2025-07-10T22:43:27 player: played "NAS/QNAP/01-Test/DSD/0105 - Yuri Korzunov - Purity DSD1024.dsf"
2025-07-10T22:43:32 player: played "NAS/QNAP/01-Test/DSD/0101 - Morgan Wade - Total Control DSD64.dsf"
2025-07-10T22:43:35 player: played "NAS/QNAP/01-Test/DSD/0102 - Morgan Wade - 2AM in London DSD128.dsf"
2025-07-10T22:43:39 player: played "NAS/QNAP/01-Test/DSD/0103 - Morgan Wade - Hansel and Gretel DSD256.dsf"
2025-07-10T22:43:42 player: played "NAS/QNAP/01-Test/DSD/0104 - Morgan Wade - Walked on Water DSD512.dsf"
Originally, it was passively cooled with a heatsink, but after enclosing it in a case, temperatures climbed above 70 °C. To counter that, I mounted a silent fan (repurposed from the ICE Tower) and run it continuously at 3.3 V. Now the temperature stays stable between 59 °C and 62 °C.
And I can hardly hear it.
The original rpi5 fan makes to much noise. The DAC is moved to the back using a 15 CM flatcable, so all connections are at the back panel.
actually it’s not even DoP (otherwise you won’t even need to increase the CPU frequency)
with DoP you still send a DSD stream, but encapsulated as PCM frames. The DAC then reconstructs the DSD stream out of the PCM packages and plays it with no DSD->PCM conversion
with RPi unfortunately DoP still doesn’t work on the internal I2S interface, so you must select DSD-direct for the PCM->DSD on-the-fly conversion. With DoP you will most probably get only noise.
I’ve tried your settings and my temps are good even after 10 min of playing DSD thru i2s. Tho I don’t have the same DAC HAT as you guys. I have to do this weird thing where I have to playing a 44/16 FLAC first and then it’ll play the DSD or sometimes it’ll play DSD right after boot/reboot.
