I had a planned power outage last night so I did the right thing. Powered off my Volumio Rivo, turned off the external DAC and waited for the power to come back on. Once it did I switched it all back on. That’s when the trouble started.
First of all ‘ALSA - no such device exists’.
So after some mucking around with no success I did a factory reset. Yay, there it is!
But wait, no music…
Now the Rivo won’t recognize the DAC I’ve been using and now after almost the whole day of trying, it still doesn’t.
Luckily for me my trusty WIIM Pro started immediately and is doing the business, streaming music as if nothing happened.
What a reliable little piece of audio equipment!
Anyway I’m officially over my time with the Volumio Rivo. To be honest many of these ‘audiophile’ servers are totally fragile and high maintenance, but the inexpensive Toyota Corolla’s of the audio world like the WIIM Pro just get it right.
I cut my teeth in the world of streaming audio many moons ago with landmark products such as the original Squeezebox, then along came the Logitech Squeezebox Duet and finally the last of the Squeezeboxes, the legendary Squeezebox Touch.
Each of them (especially the Duet) drove me to the edge of insanity but I persevered time and time again and solved the Pandora’s box of issues.
Years later here I go again with an issue materializing literally from nowhere, only this time I just can’t be bothered. The WIIM has been playing music all day while the esoteric Rivo stands silent.
My bedroom RPI4 is still trucking on but alas it’s time to move on from the Rivo.
I switched off, unplugged, plugged in, switched back on, my Rivo a zillion times ahead and after thunderstorm warnings. Never had a problem whatsoever. I don’t think the Rivo is fragile. It is based on a similar technology as the RPI, only with better components. Years ago, Volumio OS had teething problems, but the recent versions I found to be very stable. I don’t download betas and I wait for a few days with installing a new version, until everyone seems happy, and never had any problem so far.
Same here,I haven’t had any issues with the Rivo, even though I occasionally break my own advice and unplug the LPS power cable without properly shutting it down.
On top of that, my Rivo is subjected to all kinds of test scenarios, I’m putting it through the worst kind of abuse imaginable.
That said, I doubt it’s Rivo-related; it’s probably caused by something else. However with no information or log it’s hard to resolve.
ALSA - no such device exists
This typically occurs if you start music playback before the Rivo has fully booted.
It means the connection to your DAC isn’t ready. I’ve seen this happen with my own DAC when its standby timeout is shorter than Rivo’s boot time.
In those cases, I simply power the DAC back on, and Volumio (Rivo) picks it up immediately.
As Rivo owner your entitled to premium support, did you use it?
All I want is for an audio product to play music when I want it to, I don’t want to become a technician trying to get it to work when I have friends over for dinner and it’s misbehaving.
Thank f##k for my turntable and my CD player.
Oh and thanks to WIIM for being (so far) bulletproof, even though it doesn’t have (ahem) the audiophile cred of the Rivo.
My experience with the Rivo has been that it is rock solid and stable. It exceeds the stability of the Pi5 which I thought was very good. If you shelled out all the money for the Rivo, you should consider giving “Support” a chance.
As you said, you are comparing the Toyota to the Mercedes. So you get what you pay for.
I had the same experience with the Volumio-powered SMSL N100. The unit came to me obviously pre-configured by someone in China, so I had to figure out how to shift the interface to English without the benefit of being able to read the menu items. After that I had a hell of a time connecting to it, and once I did, the interface would sometimes not come up at all. I had to unplug it for some reason and the damn thing never came back. After 4 days I boxed it up and sent it back. To the credit of the guys at APOS, they were with me all the way and were as helpful as they could be with an obviously unfinished product.
I have had similar experiences. Rivo+ loses Roon, and I have to do the factory reset too often. It always comes back, but I agree it is fragile. My previous device, the Eversolo A6 was much more stable, but does not sound any where near as good as the Rivo+ with Lineo5. The sound quality is substantially improved with the Rivo. Volumio’s software is not solid, and does not hold a candle to Roon. I have too much invested to go another direction, but if it was someone less technical than me, I would not recommend it at all. I feel like you have to be a tech nerd for this device to be feasible. Volumio has a long way to go.
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