Raspberry Pi USB : noisy?

[Beershaun]

Yes. Should be easy to measure a dac analog SINAD output in an analyzer with a pi3 and pi4 as input to quantify said noise.

 

[G-rig]

Yes.. not worried either way, there's no real reason to buy the old raspberry pi unless maybe budget if you wanted to do it as cheap as possible.

 

[Martin]

I used to run Volumio on a Raspberry Pi 3 then on a Pi 4 with Logitech Media Server on my Synology NAS. I now run piCorePlayer with LMS embedded on my 2GB Pi 4. Very stable nice sounding WiFi streamer. Volumio was very laggy on the same Pi 4 even with LMS on the NAS. PiCorePlayer is great. I think Hans is hearing things.

Martin

 

[G-rig]

Don't worry about Hank, never even heard of him, bit to be honest a lot of people in the hi-fi audio game like to over analyse things and create problems that don't exist. It's a fun field to be interested in but personally I'm probably more about the music enjoyment (maybe 60% music and 40% tech).

Have paid the annual fee for volumio and will continue using it for now, works very well considering and was fairly impossible trying to set up something with foobar (and don't have a NAS) so the pi with SSD plugged in is a great cheap solution. Perhaps trial ver 3 which was recently released, although as long as you have something that works then that's the main thing. I find it I very quick to skip tracks etc, but given the nature of it you expect to be a little bit of lag. Even a cd takes time to initially spin up. Still haven't got around to testing other free solutions but find the tidal connect interface handy as well. Still sounds very clean and good with adi-2 and Yamaha monitors.

 

[Mark Dirac]

Fair bit better than Chromecast audio, particularly now gapless playback is possible.

Except you can cast pretty much any app to Chromecast Audio and pretty much no app to RPi.

 

[G-rig]

Except you can cast pretty much any app to Chromecast Audio and pretty much no app to RPi.

Oh right. There are heaps of apps to use the RPI. But depends what you want to do, Bluetooth is handy too.

Non Gapless sucks bro, and you can't buy CCA for a while now. Not getting rid of mine, still plugged into optical input. Was great for ages for what it was, no idea why Google didn't keep it.. most of their customer base just care about videos, not audiophiles.

 

[ahofer]

Except you can cast pretty much any app to Chromecast Audio and pretty much no app to RPi.

if it is running ROPIEEXL, you can Roon, Airplay, Squeezebox. Only not Chromecast.

 

[Palle]

I heard from a famous audiophile youtuber today, that the audio USB output of the Raspberry Pi is very noisy.

I was a bit disappointed at first because this is exactly what I use to stream my music. But then I thought well I can’t hear any noise so why worry, right?

But now there’s this voice in my head... I’m listening to a noisy source. But am I? Is it scientifically proven that this is a ‘dirty’ source? He was also complaining about the power source for the Raspi. I’m using the standard wall plug but as an audiophile you should at least buy a PSU of course!

On my Raspberry i use Ifi power X 5v.
And Ifi usb purifier 3
And Supra excalibur usb cable.
Connected to a Topping D90 MQA Dac
The sound got from good to just amazing with those tweaks.
My friend and I tested he's ifi streamer vs my setup.
We couldn't hear any difference at all.
Don't listen to Hans

 

[sjeesjie]

On my Raspberry i use Ifi power X 5v.
And Ifi usb purifier 3
And Supra excalibur usb cable.
Connected to a Topping D90 MQA Dac
The sound got from good to just amazing with those tweaks.
My friend and I tested he's ifi streamer vs my setup.
We couldn't hear any difference at all.
Don't listen to Hans

So what are you suggesting? Getting power filters, extra expensive cables etc but not listening to Hans who supports all that crap?

 

[Killingbeans]

[snark] Sounds like: Don't belive the alchemist Hans, but belive your own alchemy. [/snark]

But, seriously welcome to ASR @Palle

Just so you know, this is not a place where expensive USB cables and the likes are considered anything but snake-oil.

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[Roland68]

So what are you suggesting? Getting power filters, extra expensive cables etc but not listening to Hans who supports all that crap?

If it's all about the voice in your head, then get an Intona USB 2.0 Isolator (the small version will do). It is an industrial device that is used in industry, medicine and measurement technology.
If you don't hear a difference, you can return it for 30 days and be sure there's no problem.

Basically, USB is a very cheap (by any means) and dirty interface. It's all the more amazing that it works so well in the audio field.
At least I haven't found a direct interface (e.g. AES, i2s or i2s over LVDS) that had any sound advantage for me. And I've tried a few things, including various hacks that tap directly from i2s.

With modern DACs, USB is not a problem for two reasons:
- Most DACs do not use the power supply from the USB line, so there can be no interference in the device.
- This also applies to the processing of the digital signal. It is so good in most of today's DACs that additional devices do not bring any improvement.

With many (especially cheap) computers and notebooks, the USB cable is very "dirty" and still works perfectly. That will be better with the Raspberry.