Stutter at start of tracks after changing DAC

Help and Support Help
1

Pi2, HifiBerry Digi, Volumio 2.201. Playing 44.1kHz flacs served from a Synology NAS over wifi.

I was previously using a Denon DAC and the optical out and didn’t experience any playback issues. Now I’ve switched to using the coaxial in on a Yamaha A-S801 amp with built in DAC and just about every song will stutter once or twice in the opening seconds, which really ruins the whole experience. Playback is totally fine after the opening second or two.

I’ve put “audio buffer size” up to 12mb and “buffer before play” to 30% but this hasn’t solved it (I’m not certain but it may have even got worse - have I misunderstood these settings?)

Can this really be the fault of the DAC? Or is it more likely that one of my housemates is doing some serious downloading and slowing down the network tonight?

I see that a new version is out. Can I upgrade through the GUI? Or do I need to re-flash and reconfigure everything? My library takes hours to rescan so I’m keen to avoid that.

Thanks for your help, as always.

2

I was about to post the same problem. I have a rpi2 with a usb harddrive and a second rpi1 that has that hard drive mounted as a network drive. The rpi1 will sometimes (maybe 25% of the time) stutter like that in the first few seconds of a song. In case it matters, the rpi2 is a wired connection and the rpi1 is on wifi, though it gets a good signal.

I was hoping there might be an option to buffer the next song in the queue rather than just the one currently playing.

3

Are you using a USB audio device?

I used to have a lot of similar problems basically because the USB ports on a Pi aren’t up to much. This is compounded when using a wired connection as the ethernet port runs on the same bus as the USB (my terminology may be a little off here…)

Since switching to a NAS connected via wifi and an optical/ coaxial output my playback has been massively improved (until now that is).

4

Is there anything I can do to resolve this? Volumio is broken for me until this is fixed. 90% of tracks now skip and the only thing that is changed is the DAC, how does that make any sense?

Is there any kind of paid support available for volumio? I’m constantly running into trouble with it despite being reasonably technical (web developer with a background in sound engineering) and as soon as something is fixed in an update another thing fails. It feels like we’re so close to having such a great piece of software here but I’m constantly one step away from getting it right. I’d be so happy to sign up to something like Patreon in order to get some kind of support.

5

I’ve updated to the latest version but still get the same error. The glitch is always within the first three seconds of a track and only happens once.

What’s likely to be the culprit here? Are there any settings I should be looking at? Are the buffer settings working in the latest version of volumio? They don’t appear to make any difference.

6

I’ve switched back to the optical connection and it appears to have solved the problem, very, very strange. Not ideal as I’ve only one optical in and it’s needed by my PC at the moment, but I guess I can make it work

7

This is interesting - I have an issue with Volumio incorporated in John Westlake’s new Stream Box, which is essentially a souped up Raspberry Pi - and when using the DAC in the Yamaha AS801 I am getting regular stuttering - more so when playing Classic FM web radio.

But since I changed DAC the stuttering has seemingly gone away (early days yet, I am still testing and researching)