Review and Measurements of Aoide DAC II Pi HAT

[daftcombo]

Actually last time we saw the headless panther was for totaldac.

 

[bunkbail]

Actually last time we saw the headless panther was for totaldac.

I think it was Schiit Valhalla, the review came a little later than Totaldac's.

 

[nm4711]

I knew, that it has to perform bad, because of the Pink Panther. But I did not expect this.

When I was searching for DAC boards to use with my DSP, I've seen some comments on cheap ES9018k2m, etc boards. They had the same problem, but concluded, that the reason is digital gain applied in the DAC chip itself, when not proper initialized. I don't know if it's true, but you definitely can apply digital gain in ESS DACs.

 

[Silou]

Did you listen to it with a proper amplifier? I am curious how you would describe your listening experience

 

[PierreV]

We have our PRaT(*) champion

(*) Probably Randon Audio Transmission

 

[somebodyelse]

Regarding the output saturation, it may be affected by the driver used. HifiBerry (among others) apply a limit to the maximum volume in the driver to avoid saturation on the output. Aoide have a driver package, but it's not included in upstream Raspbian or apparently in most of the audio player images, Volumio being the exception. Note that this won't alter the measured performance below saturation - it just stops you pushing the volume up too far.

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.

The product page shows the headphone jack being driven by a TPA6133A2, not a direct connection to the RCAs.

 

[AudioSceptic]

It'd be great if you get a chance to test some more high-performance DAC HATs along the vein of the ALLO and ApplePi units. We've now seen the broken, the low end, the cheap but cheerful (HifiBerry), and the very top end... is there anything else better? or close? to the top end?

Again, it's great to see DAC HATs reviewed - aside from just a few manufacturers that provide their own data, there is absolutely no way to know the implementation is so craptacular as the Aoide unit, without someone hooking it up an looking.

I suspect the Allo Katana, Apple Pi, and Audiophonics, plus the Khadas Tone Board (not a Pi HAT but for a rival SBC) will be hard to beat, but I agree with Archimago <http://archimago.blogspot.com/2016/09/preview-set-up-raspberry-pi-3-model-b.html> that the HiFiBerry DAC+ Pro sounds surprisingly good. Perhaps digital stuff doesn't need to be as good as we think? Remember that 0.1% (-60 dB) distortion was at one time considered "hi-fi" and -80 dB is 0.01%, extremely low by analogue standards.

 

[Julf]

Perhaps digital stuff doesn't need to be as good as we think? Remember that 0.1% (-60 dB) distortion was at one time considered "hi-fi" and -80 dB is 0.01%, extremely low by analogue standards.

Indeed. The DAC is pretty much never the weak link.