• WANTED: Happy members who like to discuss audio and other topics related to our interest. Desire to learn and share knowledge of science required. There are many reviews of audio hardware and expert members to help answer your questions. Click here to have your audio equipment measured for free!

Raspberry Pi-based DAC/headphone amp idea

Dogen

Senior Member
Forum Donor
Joined
Aug 31, 2018
Messages
362
Likes
615
Location
Durham, NC USA
I’ve just started looking into using this platform to build my dream, one-box headphone amp: wireless Airplay input with digital DSP including equalizer and variable crossfeed. The stuff from Hifiberry looks look; The missing link seems to be a board to serve as the headphone amp. Has anyone attempted a project that might help me visualize a solution?
 

maverickronin

Major Contributor
Forum Donor
Joined
Jul 19, 2018
Messages
2,527
Likes
3,310
Location
Midwest, USA
If it has to be one box, the best value option might be to to rip the board out of JDS Atom and put it in you own enclosure. An O2 kit would be cheaper with a little less power.
 

watchnerd

Grand Contributor
Joined
Dec 8, 2016
Messages
12,449
Likes
10,414
Location
Seattle Area, USA
I’ve just started looking into using this platform to build my dream, one-box headphone amp: wireless Airplay input with digital DSP including equalizer and variable crossfeed. The stuff from Hifiberry looks look; The missing link seems to be a board to serve as the headphone amp. Has anyone attempted a project that might help me visualize a solution?

Why can't you use their existing AMP2 board?

amp2-4000x4000-768x768.jpg


You just need to wire it to a headphone jack.
 

somebodyelse

Major Contributor
Joined
Dec 5, 2018
Messages
3,739
Likes
3,024
It sounds like a viable project. All the bits have certainly been done separately, but they may not have been combined.

The AMP2 doesn't seem the ideal headphone amp to me. There are other DACs for the Pi that have built in headphone amps and volume control. The iqAudio ones use the TPA6133A so they'll have >=10R output impedance.

For a bit more DIY you could try the OAP1622EVM - see TI's datasheets for measured performance. There's a thread or two at diyaudio.com about how to hook them up properly if you're not using a dac with balanced outputs. You'll need a power supply for that too, and look a the datasheet for how to connect the enable pin to avoid pops on power on/off. I'd expect that to be somewhere between the O2 and Atom. Or just use the guts of a DX3Pro.

moOde looks like it should cover your software desires - it supports most of the DACs for the Pi, generic USB DACs, eq, crossfade and Airplay. I don't think any of the other usual suspects (Rune, Volumio, PiCorePlayer etc.) have the crossfeed included.

Alternatively you can do the eq and crossfeed manually, but it may be tricky to get the setup right depending on what else you're using. The usual way is to add virtual devices to the alsa configuration for the bs2b crossfeed plugin and one of the equaliser plugins, and virtual mixer configuration for their controls. You then need to point the player software or pulseaudio to the right sound device. I've done similar things, but not tried those plugins myself. See here for some old instructions that should still be mostly valid, but with different sound devices as it was done on a PC, and here for a discussion of the same idea applied to Rune running on a Pi. I'm sure I've seen something on using EQ with PiCorePlayer but i can't find the thread.
 
Top Bottom