Stuttering Audio via USB DAC playback - suggestions?

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1

Hello there!

I found out recently about Volumio and installed it on a old Raspberry Pi 1 B.

My idea was to create a nice little streaming setup for my bedroom with a good sound.

Streaming music from my Synology NAS works so far. The GUI driven by the Rpi 1 isn’t that fast but its ok for me.
Most of my music is encoded in flac (44.1/24 higher) and I also have lots of audiobooks encoded as mp3.

While the on-board TRS-output sounds quite bad, I decided to use a USB Dac.
I have a Cambridge DACmagic Plus which I plugged directly via balanced XLR into some older 4" active broadcast studio monitors (KH M50).

This improved the sound significantly, but there is also a lot of stuttering and glitching during the audio playback.

I figured out that the Rpi does not have a separate Ethernet component and uses the usb hub for Ethernet connection.
I think there is not enoug bandwith on the usb controller to stream music from my NAS and output music via usb at the same time.

So what now?

The Dacmagic Plus can also handle signals from s/pdif sources.
So, I found a tutorial on the HifiBerry page that showed where to solder some extra pins to the board to use a i2n DAC.
Next step will be to order a PiFi Hifi+ board to connect the Rpi via s/pdif with the Cambridge device.

Will this eliminate the stuttering while playback?
Is it still possible to adjust the volume from the Gui or do I need to use the DAC’s Hardware knop ? This would be a no go.

Can anyone recommend other Hardware in stead of the Rpi?

my requirement would be:

  • faster than the Rpi
  • low power consumption
  • separate USB an ethernet controller
  • fanless cooling
  • Hardware On/Off Button - I still belong to those people who like to turn off things that they dont use :wink:

Thank so far,
JayZee

2

May well be a problem. You could try playing the same tracks directly from the sd card to rule this out.

Using an i2s DAC obviously means you don’t have the competition between USB and ethernet, so if this was the original problem you should be better off. Yes, you can control the volume from the GUI (be aware that some DACs have hardware control, others don’t)

Many people are quite happily using RPis. Have a look at the downloads page for images available for other boards (take note that some of these are not recently supported).

You’ll have to do a bit of DIY to achieve this is you are going to use a headless system.