Raspberry Pi 4 and Caiman SEG

[Labarum]

I must rip a CD to uncompressed FLAC and have a listen myself, but I cannot reliably differentiate between a good quality MP3 (or AAC) stream and a FLAC stream. The best Internet Radio Stations that use lossy streams are as good as the few that stream FLAC.

On other fronts I did notice an improvement on the recent move for my old 7510 DAC to a new Caiman SEG. One of the reasons for getting the SEG was its USB input. My PiCorePlayer running in a Raspberry Pi4 now drives the DAC directly rather than via a Google Chromecast Audio. There is a workaround to allow that marriage. A plugin called Castbridge runs in Logitech Media Server/PiCorePlayer and it enables a Google Chromecast Audio to masquerade as a Squeezebox with caveats. The music can be sent track by track to the Audiocast, but without gapless replay - there the FLAC is decoded in the Audiocast. For gapless replay the whole ripped CD or playlist must be decoded from FLAC in the server and sent to the Audiocast as a straightforward single PCM stream. That is stable even with the few 24/96 FLACs I have. Either way I hear no difference when listening via the Caiman SEG driving my Sennheiser HD25 headphones; I did, however hear some improvement when removing the Google Chromecast Audio dongle from the chain. (I was using it only as a transport to feed the Caiman SEG optically.)

And all of this of course against the observation that the Caiman SEG does not measure well by modern standards. I knew that when I bought it, but did so because it has pre-amp features that cannot be found elsewhere at the price, and it is well and robustly made. The ruling principle was again "I won't hear the difference" and in general - in engineering "good enough is good enough."

I'm not wasting my life looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I just listen to the music.