This is a review and detailed measurements of the Aoide DAC II Raspberry Pi HAT DAC. It was kindly purchased by a member and drop shipped to me. He bought it from Amazon and it costs US $39.99 including Prime shipping. It uses an ESS ES9018K2M DAC Chip unlike the competing budget DACs which use the TI PCM series DAC.
Here is a shot of what it looks like:
The Aoide DAC II has some of the cheapest RCA connectors you can imagine. I worried they would snap off as I inserted my test RCA cables into it that don't require much tension. Can't imagine using "audiophile" ones with their death grip on them.
There is a 3.5 mm jack in addition to RCA but they are hooked up to each other from what I can tell. This means it has high impedance and low power so don't use it for proper headphone listening.
As with recently Raspberry DACs, I used the same Pi board running Ropieee Roon player endpoint. So all the tests are done with Roon streaming content to them.
Raspberry Pi Audio DAC Measurements
As usual, we start with our 1 kHz, 44.1 kHz sampling at 24 bits:
No, your eyes are not deceiving you. It really is producing that horrible, near square wave because it is severely clipping. The output level is high at 2.3 volts and exceeding the power supply rails. That in turn results in sever harmonic distortion that you see in FFT.
I searched for reviews of this DAC and I only found one person and he complained about the exact same thing saying it had too much gain and "THD distortion. So likely this is not a setup issue but who knows. This would be enough to stop the testing at this point but I went ahead and reduced levels by 6 dB on the input side and got a non-clipping output:
Reducing levels below this made SINAD worse as noise takes over. Using this new SINAD, this is where it would place in our DAC rankings:
Definitely not good.
Jitter is clean but with elevated noise floor:
Multitone was surprisingly free of intermodulation products. Don't know why.
White noise signal shows a filter that has a slow response but decent attenuation at high frequencies.
Conclusions
It is clear that the Aoide DAC II is a broken implementation in the configuration I tested. Whether it works with patches and/or other configs, I don't know. Given that there are plug-and-play solutions with lower distortion from likes of HifiBerry, I don't see any reason to recommend the Aoide DAC II.
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As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
The headless panther above is demanding that I use glue on the edges of its neck so that it doesn't further deteriorate. Apparently there is a panther-safe glue for this application but it is expensive. So please donate generously using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
Here is a shot of what it looks like:
The Aoide DAC II has some of the cheapest RCA connectors you can imagine. I worried they would snap off as I inserted my test RCA cables into it that don't require much tension. Can't imagine using "audiophile" ones with their death grip on them.
There is a 3.5 mm jack in addition to RCA but they are hooked up to each other from what I can tell. This means it has high impedance and low power so don't use it for proper headphone listening.
As with recently Raspberry DACs, I used the same Pi board running Ropieee Roon player endpoint. So all the tests are done with Roon streaming content to them.
Raspberry Pi Audio DAC Measurements
As usual, we start with our 1 kHz, 44.1 kHz sampling at 24 bits:
No, your eyes are not deceiving you. It really is producing that horrible, near square wave because it is severely clipping. The output level is high at 2.3 volts and exceeding the power supply rails. That in turn results in sever harmonic distortion that you see in FFT.
I searched for reviews of this DAC and I only found one person and he complained about the exact same thing saying it had too much gain and "THD distortion. So likely this is not a setup issue but who knows. This would be enough to stop the testing at this point but I went ahead and reduced levels by 6 dB on the input side and got a non-clipping output:
Reducing levels below this made SINAD worse as noise takes over. Using this new SINAD, this is where it would place in our DAC rankings:
Definitely not good.
Jitter is clean but with elevated noise floor:
Multitone was surprisingly free of intermodulation products. Don't know why.
White noise signal shows a filter that has a slow response but decent attenuation at high frequencies.
Conclusions
It is clear that the Aoide DAC II is a broken implementation in the configuration I tested. Whether it works with patches and/or other configs, I don't know. Given that there are plug-and-play solutions with lower distortion from likes of HifiBerry, I don't see any reason to recommend the Aoide DAC II.
------------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
The headless panther above is demanding that I use glue on the edges of its neck so that it doesn't further deteriorate. Apparently there is a panther-safe glue for this application but it is expensive. So please donate generously using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
