Soekris R-2R Ladder DAC

Here is a really interesting DAC

hifiduino.wordpress.com/2014/10 … est-of-us/

It is a DAC made with discrete components instead of a chip. Most implementations are quite expensive but this particular DAC is at a form factor that would integrate well with the Raspberry Pi and at a fraction of the price of those DACs.

Very curious to hear how people implement this DAC.

I got a Soekris DAC and tried it with Volumio 1.51 using the i2s configuration for the ESS9018K2M posted elsewhere on this forum. It worked out of the box and sounded superb. An improvement over the K2M, more transparent and ‘easy’. I was using one of the non-standard filters appearing on the diyaudio Soekris filter thread. Only issue was dropouts when playing 24/192 flac files. But I was getting that with the K2M as well.

When the filters improve I suspect this will turn out to be a landmark DAC.

Hi Derek.
I got the Soekris as well, but so far i have got no luck on getting it play music directly from RasPi 2 i2s connection.
Care to share your technique? I am uber noob in terminal (commandline) fwiw.

If you haven’t yet figured out how to get the soekris working with the pi:
head to /etc/modules and make sure the following lines are there (feel free to comment out the other dac modules)
snd_soc_pcm1794a
snd_soc_rpi_dac
Restart your pi and the soekris should be working!

Thanks for input.

I already went the lazy way and purchased a USB–>I2S card and it works brilliantly.
If i get bored i’ll try direct connection from R-pi again.

Is it possible to use hardware volume control with this DAC? Did you test it?

Tnx for your answer

LP
Andrej

Hi,

I have a DAM DAC and I would like to use it with volumeIO / I2S.

  • Which I2S driver to select in I2S driver Menu ?
  • Is the driver able to manage hardware volume control in DAC ?
  • How to connect Raspi to DAM (wiring) ?

Jacques

this I would really like to know!

Hi Guys,

I am a bit lost. Just started the research of the RPI 2 Capabilities.

Some posts are saying that I2S output was deprecated on the later versions, is that true ?

I would be trying to plug in my Soekris DAM to RPI2 as well, has anyone completed this so far :slight_smile: ?