Not sure if anyone has played with the Wolfson audio card available from element 14 yet. I would like to know if it can be made to work with Volumio as it looks promising. Has HD audio out as well as a built in class D amp to drive speakers directly. It is very well priced.
I am also curious if it will work (in the near future)I have heard positive remarks about it from people who already have it.
It is in the same price class as the hifiberry which I also consider but with the amp, the inputs and the analog/digital outputs more versatile.
Anyone used this yet? Got a spare co-axial input on my amp not doing anything, considering getting one of these to hook it up.
The pogo pins it uses for connecting the i2s have received some bad feedback in the element14 forum - making bad connections and such.
Maybe try this one: iqaudio.com (blatant advert for my DAC - 
)
Gordon
Dammit! Wish I’d known about this the other day before I bought an ES9023-based pcb. Looks very impressive though.
Somebody with Volumio must own one!
Just looking for the cheapest way to get spdif output and this would be a winner
I have the Wolfson card. So far I’ve only used it with the manufacturer-supplied OS image, and it sounds good. I’ve had no trouble with the pogo pins, fwiw.
Thanks.
It’s getting excellent reviews. Interesting read about it here: hifiwigwam.com/showthread.ph … Audio-Card
Thinking I’ll move my USB DAC to my PC in the office room and get at Wolfson card at some point.
I just got one and I’m wondering which output to use. I have an optical lead here with a 3.5 headphone size jack on one end. Can I plug that into wolfson card and get digital audio? 
What about the yellow spdif output, would that be mono using coaxial cable?
confused 
I just got my Wolfson Pi audio card. Not much problem setting it up. The pogo pins slotted in ok. I’m currently using it with Squeezeplug, as I don’t think Volumio currently supports it (correct me if I’m wrong!)? Squeezeplug does support the Wolfson card, and it’s pretty simple to set up. I selected to use the SPDIF out (coaxial). I plugged in the cable, selected some music, and away it went. Sounds good, and more particularly in view of many people’s experiences with USB Dacs (including me) there are no clicks or pops, even playing hi-res tracks at 96k and 192k. Also good not to have to do any soldering (and have to buy a soldering kit just to get this one thing done!).
It would be nice to use Volumio with it, so hopefully the card will be supported at some point. I think the Wolfson drivers are supposed to be included in the Raspian distribution sometime soon.
Also I’m glad to see that CPC/Farnell are now offering a box that will house the Pi and the Wolfson card. From CamdenBoss
uk.farnell.com/camdenboss/wolfso … dp/2407263
I’m also aiming to try the card out with the custom Raspbian image supplied by Wolfson.
Further progress on using the Wolfson card. I downloaded the custom Wolfson Raspian image created by Ragnar.Jensen on the element14.com website drive.google.com/file/d/0BzIaxM … sp=sharing (which is smaller than the massive official Wolfson download), flashed it to an SD card and booted up, and it recognised my Wolfson audio card.
I installed MPD and managed to get it to play a flac file using the Gnome Music Player as the client (in Ubuntu). Then I thought, Volumio is essentially a client for MPD, so couldn’t I use that instead? Looking around I found the tutorial produced by Ebsy (of these forums) at typingoutloud.org/raspberry-pi-i … io-pibang/. His tutorial is for installing Volumio on the PiBang distro, but I thought I’d give it a go and see if it works on Raspian. And guess what? It does! So I’ve now got the Volumio web-interface working with the Wolfson audio card. Possibly not all of Michelangelo’s background operating system tweaks are there, but I’m happy anyway. Nice sound, nice interface!
Maybe a stupid question;
But did you also try it out with a normal Volumio distribution to see if it recognized the Wolfson card?
I can’t remember if I did try it with the standard Volumio distribution. Probably not, as the card does require the Wolfson drivers to work, and I’m pretty sure they aren’t in the Volumio distribution at the moment. They aren’t even in the standard Raspian distribution right now, so it’s unlikely they’d have made it into Volumio. However Wolfson and Element14 say they are working to get the drivers included into the official Raspbian distribution ‘in the next few weeks’.
I have tried Volumio with the Wolfson Audio Card and unfortunately it does not work.
As tyres2 mentioned the card does require the Wolfson drivers to work.
So, if you have the Wolfson card, what are you using with it? As I said, you can use Ragnar Jensen’s version of the Wolfson image, which is a smaller download than the official Wolfson image (which is 4GB compressed!). However, using Ragnar’s image does lock you into the kernel he is using, at least in the short term. But he also includes a standard Raspian kernel, which could be switched to (and I assume upgraded) when the Wolfson drivers make it into the offical Raspian distribution. And the Volumio Web-GUI can be installed on Ragnar’s image (and presumably the offical Wolfson image too). I even rolled the ‘look and feel’ of Volumio back to the ‘Raspyfi’ look, which I prefer. I was actually still using Raspyfi before, as I found it worked better for my previous USB Dac set-up than Volumio did.
However, I have just booted up the Raspyfi distribution using the replacement Wolfson kernel supplied by Ragnar Jensen in the Element14 forums (the Wolfson Audio Card section element14.com/community/comm … wolfson_pi) . Ragnar gives an explanation in the ‘Re: Wolfson modified Noobs raspbian zipped img Cannot unzip new download’ thread of how you replace the standard kernel with the Wolfson kernel. The standard kernel is not overwritten, so you can switch back if it doesn’t work.
Presumably the same process would work for Volumio. It appears to be a non-destructive way to try it out until the Wolfson drivers hopefully get included into Volumio.
in order to use Volumio i.c.w. this card you may try this: volumio-for-normal-pcs-t951.html#p3659
If you look back up this thread a little bit you’ll see I already did that! It’s good, but essentially installs the Volumio Web-GUI, without any of the O/S background tweaks that Michangelo has done (since I don’t think we know what those tweaks are!). I may well implement Ebsy’s Volumio install over my Raspyfi setup though (the Web-GUI part). I’ve got a lot of music on the card, so I don’t want to flash it anew with Volumio. And what I’ve got now is working very well anyway. It’s a delight to listen to.
Also that set-up (volumio-for-normal-pcs-t951.html#p3659) will only ‘work with this card’ (the Wolfson card) if you have the Wolfson drivers installed. Volumio by itself currently doesn’t support the Wolfson card, as somebody else commented earlier in this thread.
Any news when Volumio will support the Wolfson card?
Not that I’ve heard. A few weeks ago Michelangelo said he was due to get a Wolfson card, but there’s been very little if any activity from Michelangelo in the forums since then, let alone about the Wolfson.
You can use the Volumio Web-GUI with the Wolfson card, by installing it using this method typingoutloud.org/raspberry-pi-i … io-pibang/
The example is for the PiBang distribution, but I found it works with a Raspyfi distribution that I’ve got (the predecessor of Volumio), and it may well work with a Volumio installation, or standard Raspian.
However, it is just the Web-GUI, not the full Volumio, so it may be missing some of Michangelo’s O/S level tweaks. Having said that, my system sounds pretty good using Ragnar Jensen’s custom Wolfson kernel and the Volumio Web-Gui.