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Cheap solution for music in silence

somebodyelse

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Literally a 2008 Dell netbook would work. Or thin clients. Audio playback, even with convolution and such, isn't that resource intensive unless you're using some ultra high quality resampler.
Following up my earlier post about Daphile on a 2003 vintage laptop, I've now tried Volumio on both x86 and Raspberry Pi 3. I couldn't repeat with the same laptop because it won't boot from the only usb stick I have that's large enough for Volumio.

Acer Aspire one A110 netbook with Atom 230 processor running Volumio & brutefir3 plugin at 192kHz sample rate, 65536 size, streaming 24/352 flac via DLNA is glitch free and has ~55% cpu usage. A significant proportion of that cpu usage is the chromium browser instance that's showing the web interface locally. This was using wired networking with the wireless interface switched off.

Raspberry Pi 3 B running Volumio & brutefir3 plugin with settings as above except for lower filter sample rate confirmed that there are still issues with at least some USB DACs. The Behringer UCA202 is limited to 48kHz output and was glitch free, but at 96kHz with a Focusrite Forte there are occasional faint pops as others have previously reported. The cpu usage was lower than with the netbook above though, so there's power available to run faster or larger filters so long as you stick to i2s interfaces for output.

In short if you want something that behaves like an expensive hifi audio streamer you can use almost any old laptop, or a very cheap used thin client. Convolution will run fine on machines that won't even boot Windows 10. If you want a more general purpose machine that runs Windows and will do other stuff then it's Windows and the other stuff that will decide what sort of spec you need.
 

graz_lag

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... and the Odroid is said not to have the usb problem ...

Just for testing - as I bought the Odroid-C2 to be used as UPnP render with its HiFi Shield 2 DAC, I plugged one of its four USB ports into my Topping DX7s DAC : no glitches, no drops out, very nice rendering.
The Odroid-C2 was receiving the digital stream from the remote server via the house wired network.
 

somebodyelse

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Just for testing - as I bought the Odroid-C2 to be used as UPnP render
A bit OT, but do you know what kernel version it's running? One idea is that the glitches are caused by a change in kernel 4.9 and above.
 

graz_lag

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A bit OT, but do you know what kernel version it's running? One idea is that the glitches are caused by a change in kernel 4.9 and above.

Will be checking this on Saturday, am not at home right now ...

However, after testing several OS, DietPi is the one I have retained as it gets interfacing the HiFi Shield 2 DAC with Alsa right away with no scripts as with other OS instead.
That impacts only the I2S onboard DAC.

The C-2 board was still very fast under Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver as well, but my testing with the Topping DX7S were done under DietPi.

Cheers
 

graz_lag

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A bit OT, but do you know what kernel version it's running? One idea is that the glitches are caused by a change in kernel 4.9 and above.

The Odroid C-2 DietPi is based on the 3.16.57 kernel, no glitches from both the USB output to the Topping DX7s and RCA output via the onboard HiFi Shield 2 DAC.
On another machine of mine, I am running Ubuntu Bionic Beaver 4.15.0-45 generic kernel, no glitches at all either here.
 
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