I have problem playing DSD 256 audio with Volumio (latest version) through Allo Digione. The Digione is connect to ifi iOne Dac via spdif coax cable. The audio file is played from the thumb drive attached directly to the Pi.
My Dac is capable of handling audio up to DSD 256. But i am experiencing stuttering when playing the DSD 256. I have no issue when playing DSD 126 and below format files.
Thanks Pablo, but the audio file is located in the thumb drive plugged into the Pi, not sure if the network bandwidth has any effect on the playback. Could it be the transfer bandwidth between the thumb drive to the Dac, or limited computing power of the Pi to process DSD 256?
I am experiencing a similar problem since my latest upgrade of Volumio, just in a more severe form, as I believe it has to do with the USB traffic load. In my case the files are on a USB stick and the DAC is fed via USB. I have occasional stuttering starting with 16bit/48KHz wav files and the higher the bitrate the more frequent the stuttering.
In your case the USB bus is used only for fetching the files, you feed the DAC via SPDIF, hence your problem happens only at higher bitrates (DSD256 which is pretty high).
I was not having the problem on the same HW configuration before the update, running a version of Volumio dating back to May 2020.
Here is the post detailing my problem for cross-reference.
Hi Nicola, i have yet to try on the earlier version of Volumio. Have been tweaking the buffer and and allocated cache size in the setting, but still facing the same issue. I think Volumio launch a new version just today, till i reach home, will give it a try if it solves my issue.
I confirm that higher buffering percentages and cache sizes do not improve the situation, as those I think only enter into play when streaming music, not when your music files are fetched from a mounted device.
Downloaded the latest version of Volumio. Kinda solves the issued. I have to enable audio resampling, set it to 24bit and to 96khz, any higher resampling frequency the stuttering will reoccur. At least it solved my issue in expense of enjoying the full resolution of DSD256.
I tried audio resampling also at the lowest settings (16bit/44.1KHz) and the problem still occurs.
I have also reformatted the USB Memory Stick and copied over all the files again, just superstition, you know, it made no difference anyway.
USB 2.0 should support 480 MBit/s. Reading a 16bit/192KHz file requires a little over 3 Mbit/s and pushing it to the DAC as is requires another 3 MBit/s. This is peanuts for the USB 2.0 protocol. It cannot be a bandwidth problem. And it would have come up also with the older versions of Volumio.
UPDATE: tonight automagically my Volumio v2.853 on the ASUS Tinker Board worked again without issues. I have reproduced an album sampled at 192/16, another at DSD128 and finally a third one at 48/16. In all cases not a single glitch, or stuttering.
The only notable thing that has happened is that I have left the Tinker Board switched on for the whole day. Maybe some background operations got completed and are no longer interfering with the music reproduction? I don’t have any other explanation. Glad it is working again.