Music Service Shield for Volumio (shield of processes useful?)

[domiji]

Hello ASR community,

i've gone trough a tough process of massive downsizing my "useless" audiophile gear from a 5k$ headphone electronic-stack (ifi iDSD Pro, iCAN Pro and a lot of other stuff like a Naim Uniti Atom HE) and very expensive headphones like Focal Utopia, Audeze LCD4z, ZMF Verite Closed (and a few more) to a wonderful "high end free" setup of a Topping A50s, D50s and P50 (just for convenience) and a Sennheiser HD800s (with EQ).

Now i use a small Raspberry Pi with Volumio as my streamer - it works flawless and i am very happy. I found a Volumio Plugin called "Music Service Shield" which isolates some processes to specific CPU cores and i was wondering if something like this is gonna make a change in sound quality. From my perspective "no" it won't make a difference but it would be great to hear your experience and opinions on that.

Thanks for your help and have a great day

Best
Dom

 

[Katji]

If it works flawlessly as it is then there would be no change. Using specific CPU cores or threads could only make a difference to data transfer/buffering or process priority, related to glitches/stuttering.

 

[HarmonicTHD]

Hello ASR community,

i've gone trough a tough process of massive downsizing my "useless" audiophile gear from a 5k$ headphone electronic-stack (ifi iDSD Pro, iCAN Pro and a lot of other stuff like a Naim Uniti Atom HE) and very expensive headphones like Focal Utopia, Audeze LCD4z, ZMF Verite Closed (and a few more) to a wonderful "high end free" setup of a Topping A50s, D50s and P50 (just for convenience) and a Sennheiser HD800s (with EQ).

Now i use a small Raspberry Pi with Volumio as my streamer - it works flawless and i am very happy. I found a Volumio Plugin called "Music Service Shield" which isolates some processes to specific CPU cores and i was wondering if something like this is gonna make a change in sound quality. From my perspective "no" it won't make a difference but it would be great to hear your experience and opinions on that.

Thanks for your help and have a great day

Best
Dom

I fully agree with Katji.
It might prevent dropouts when you load the RPi CPU with other stuff. But this is hardly the case when you use the Pi for streaming only and even if, you can still increase the buffer to safeguard against (data) drop outs.