View Full Version : HiFiBerry digi board
Have any of the Raspberry Pi users on here had a play with one of these:
http://www.hifiberry.com/hbdigi
I saw the webpage about a month ago but they were out of stock of the boards at the time, so I got on the mailing list and pulled the trigger and ordered one as soon as I got the Email to say they had a second round of boards in stock. Just wondered if anyone had any experience of them on here. Looks like a bit of fun. Have been intrigued about getting decent quality audio out of a Pi and this might do the trick. I like the look of running the Volumio player on it too. If it stacks up anywhere close to the Squeezebox Touch in terms of sound quality then I may finally have found my contingency when it finally does go belly up.
The board has just arrived so I shall be playing over the next few days...
Hi Rich,
stumbled also over the berry link a couple weeks ago.
It sounds interesting but I hesitated due to several reasons:
a) neither I can solder nor do I have the equipment
b) a case for the Pi/Berry combo is - at least it appears to me - also only via DIY approach available and
c) I thought the Pi will have buffering problems with hires files.
But would be great if you can share your experiences. Maybe I'm mistaken with points b&c.
Cheers
The soldering is minimal. I'm sure the blurb on the website said that you'd have to solder all of the connectors to the board, but mine came completely made up and ready to go. The only bit I did have to solder was the little 8-pin header onto the P5 connector Rasperry Pi board itself. For some reason the P5 only has through holes but nothing attached to it and this is where the I2S audio comes from the Pi into the digi board.
Well it's taken a bit of playing about with tonight. I had downloaded Volumio a week or two back in readiness, but it turns out that I had version 1.1 and the HifiBerry digi board is only supported from 1.2 so back I went to write another SD card. Once that was done, I inserted the card and powered up the board again. Once it had booted, the lock light appeared on my DAC - Hurrah!
I have music, albeit only internet radio so far. Having some problems getting the mount point for my NAS drive to work, so not been able to play anything from my own collection so far, so a bit more playing around to do - but that's for tomorrow. I'm pleased enough that it's playing audio for now...
Got it now. It's playing music from the NAS drive nicely. There's an odd bug in Volumio that can prevent the mount points from being created properly so I had to hack about with it and mount manually.
So far it's playing standard red book 16/44 and 24/96 without a glitch from FLACs ALACs and MP3s. It had a good stab at 24/192 but stuttered a bit, so might have to play around with caching to get that smooth. So far it's looking very promising. It's got a LONG way to go functionally before it can displace the SBT yet but that's where the fun starts...
Cool... sounds good.
Based on what you "heard" so far do you think it sounds inferior compared to the Touch?
Do you already have a case for it?
No case for it as yet, so it's a bit naked, but I'll sort this out once the dust settles a bit.
Sound quality wise - Well, I didn't want to make any sweeping statements based on a couple of hours of listening, and it may be a case of emperor's new clothes but from what I've heard so far, based on sound quality alone, the SBT could well be dead in the water. The first few notes of the first song I heard from Linn Radio last night just brought a really big grin on. The SBT has never been renowned for having the sweetest or cleanest treble, and the HiFiBerry picks up a great big placard and waves it in the face of the SBT that says 'THIS IS HOW YOU REPRODUCE HF'. I'm hearing a level of insight the SBT has never even hinted at. I don't want to say any more at the moment, because as I say, I've only had a couple of hours play so far, but I'll have a much clearer picture over the weekend. If I'm bleary eyed on Monday morning, I'll know it's been a good move :).
But as I say, functionally there's a long way to go to beat the SBT. Currently I have no Spotify, or much beyond the radio stations that come pre-programmed and the way my NAS music has been sorted is unintuitive to say the least, so there's a lot of research and tweaking to do.
But based on the fact that I've done a lot with my SBT - Power supply upgrades, Touch toolbox mods, Triodes EDO output plugin etc. etc. the HiFiBerry is on another level out of the box, and I've not even scratched the surface with exploring things like SRCs and different kernel tweaks available for Volumio yet.
At the moment, I'm pretty excited about it... Let's see if the software can be made to do what I want it to.
Can one you guys explain a little about what's need to Raspberry Pi play music. I've found Volumio on the web. As I've not touched a Raspberry Pi I'm totally a novice with it.
If I bought a Raspberry Pi and HiFBerry what do need in terms of a monitor/keyboard/mouse and would it connect to my USB2/3 disk with my music? It looks like it's possible to connect USB drives but would I end up having to learn Linux? I'm sure I can learn Linux but I don't really have the time to get immersed in it. Should it be possible to dip my toe in the water without having to jump straight in?
Hi Clive,
In answer to your last question I would say so. Having installed Volumio I've needed nothing more connected to my Pi, no keyboard, mouse or even monitor required. Volumio by default installs a remote login application, so if you have a computer on the same network - whether it's a Windows PC, Linux box or Mac, you'll be able to log into it remotely and do any 'configuring' you need to do. Volumio runs a nice web interface for setting up all of the options, so you just point at volumio.local with your web-browser and as long as there's a connection over the network, you get your configuration options displayed nicely. You can even do all of your playback from the web browser if you like, but I'll be going down the route of running an app on my Android tablet (which is already running but looks a bit clunky at the moment).
So in terms of hardware, all you really need is the Pi, the HiFiBerry board and a power supply (the HiFiBerry takes its power from the Pi board so worth making sure you have a supply that will deliver at least 1.5amps at 5V).
Yes, there are bugs with Volumio at the moment, but there seems to be plenty of community support around so you shouldn't need to be a Linux expert (I'm not) to get it working.
Thanks Rich for your reply. I'll do some research and may well give this a go to see how it compares to MQn on PC.
No worries - Give us a shout if you need any assistance with setting it up. It's a bit of a learning curve and good to share it.
Doing a bit more reading it looks like I can get Airplay running, which might solve the lack of Spotify. If that works and sounds half decent it'll be fantastic as I much prefer using the Spotify browser to any 3rd party plugins for it.
Sovereign
11-04-2014, 22:24
Really interesting Lovejoy, thanks for keeping us informed. I can see me adding this to my DIY DAC within the next few months, but as it stands I am also a novice.
Cool Rich. Glad the sound is fine so far.
Guess you have far more "use cases" than I have. Although I added the Linn radio url's i don't use them anymore. The only use case i have is music stored on the NAS and streaming via Touch - controlled via Android app.
So i prefer the "headless" approach and I hope this will be feasible also with the PI/Berry combo.
Since you mentioned some sorting issues I hope this is nothing "serious". Btw... which app do you use for controlling?
Just want to add that you can also turn it into a squeezebox player using piCoPlayer
http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?97803-piCoPlayer-Squeezelite-on-Microcore-linux-An-embedded-OS-in-RAM-with-Squeezelite
And there are also other hardware add-ons for the pi... I have yet to buy my HifiBerry board but I have played around with piCoPlayer for months using HDMI and USB as output.
Just want to add that you can also turn it into a squeezebox player using piCoPlayer
http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?97803-piCoPlayer-Squeezelite-on-Microcore-linux-An-embedded-OS-in-RAM-with-Squeezelite
Funny you should mention that Jan. I've just downloaded piCorePlayer for a try. It sounds like a bit of a home from home in terms of being able to run it from my existing Squeezebox server and remote apps.
I've given up with Volumio for the time being. The sorting issue sorted itself out eventually and I had a full library which was great and it still sounds fantastic. The problem I kept getting was that it was regularly becoming unresponsive after a period of use with either the remote app or the web browser. If I then logged in via SSH to look at the processes it showed that PHP was eating up all of the available CPU bandwidth whenever I tried to connect via the remote or the webapp.
So that's brought me to try piCorePlayer, but I'll no doubt revisit Volumio as it's an excellent looking (not to mention sounding) piece of software. It'll be interesting to hear if piCorePlayer sounds different... If it works, I'll report back.
piCorePlayer was an absolute breeze to set up. Once the image is written to an SD card it's just a matter of inserting it, switching on, waiting for it to load (about 20 seconds or so - probably as quick if not quicker than an SBT), configure the output device and as long as there's a Squeezebox Server running, you're away.Brilliant.
So once I'd set it to output to my HifiBerry digi and restarted the Squeezelite player, it was good to go, so I had a mammoth music session with it yesterday, which ended up running into the early hours. First impressions were that it didn't sound as good as Volumio - I didn't get that silly grin I get when I know 'This is going to be good'. From what I could gather, it seemed a bit flatter with less life and imaging than Volumio, but I didn't do a direct A/B so that might not be right. Nevertheless we're nit picking here, because it was still a level above the fully tweaked SBT.
Later on though, I got around to playing with its upsampling capabilities using sox. The GUI for piCorePlayer has a box where you can add a command line for upsampling so I just put a -u in here to turn sox on with the default upsampling settings. Sure enough, on reboot, my NAIM DAC was registering hi-res input, and that's how it stayed for the rest of the night as I played tune after tune after tune of engaging, musical, controlled, weighty, detailed audio. One thing that bowled me over is how much upsampling benefits Spotify playback. Spotify has always had this slight harshness to it which doesn't persuade you to do any extended listening, but upsampling seems to remove it and I spent a good few hours exploring new music with it last night.
All very good indeed...
RPi owners are spoilt for choice now with stuff like the Wolfson Audio card, HiFiBerry DAC, HiFiBerry DIGI and another new one to me The IQaudIO Pi-DAC audio card: http://iqaudio.com/
You should give squeezeplug a try: http://www.squeezeplug.eu/
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