'Analog Dinosaur' succumbs to the joys of FBA : enter Raspberry Pi 2/IQ-Audio DAC+!!

[cyclopse]

Time to open a brand new can of worms, look away now if you're of a nervous disposition:

Has anyone else noticed how sensitive the IQ DAC is to interconnect quality? Quite by accident, I managed to swap a set of interconnects with my CD player and suddenly realised the sound from the Pi/IQ had changed quite significantly - It had taken on a hard edge and the HF was sounding somewhat rough. Picking up on what must have caused this change straight away as I'd been unplugging and re-plugging everything, I tried swapping out a couple more interconnects I had lying around and the differences are much more marked between the cables than any piece of kit I've ever tried different cables on before, to the point that if I'd initially had the Pi connected using my CD player interconnects, I don't think I'd ever have been that impressed with it and wondered what all the fuss was about. At the moment, I've settled on a set of Supra interconnects at 0.75m which have very low capacitance values (these were cables I'd chosen for my turntable when I was using an MM cart but have since moved to MC).

So that's got me thinking - Are these large differences down to the fact that there's not that much in the way of a buffering stage in the analogue output of the IQ DAC? In which case, how would it fare with something like a Musical Fidelity X-10D on the end of it, or similar buffering stage - Or can it be Lampizated? Now that sounds like a project!!

Could this explain the poor results in a small number of cases?

[NRG]

Could be...good find Richard. There's no o/p filtering or opamp from the DAC chip so what it's attached to could have a huge impact on how it sounds....

[montesquieu]

Just try the mount option sec=ntlm

On Voumio web UI, enter NAS details but also go to "advanced options" and in the "Mount flags" put the following text: sec=ntlm

Finally got round to giving this a go ... didn't help, just caused it to go into a loop. Took the SD card out in the end.

[Gazjam]

Time to open a brand new can of worms, look away now if you're of a nervous disposition:

Has anyone else noticed how sensitive the IQ DAC is to interconnect quality? Quite by accident, I managed to swap a set of interconnects with my CD player and suddenly realised the sound from the Pi/IQ had changed quite significantly - It had taken on a hard edge and the HF was sounding somewhat rough. Picking up on what must have caused this change straight away as I'd been unplugging and re-plugging everything, I tried swapping out a couple more interconnects I had lying around and the differences are much more marked between the cables than any piece of kit I've ever tried different cables on before, to the point that if I'd initially had the Pi connected using my CD player interconnects, I don't think I'd ever have been that impressed with it and wondered what all the fuss was about. At the moment, I've settled on a set of Supra interconnects at 0.75m which have very low capacitance values (these were cables I'd chosen for my turntable when I was using an MM cart but have since moved to MC).

So that's got me thinking - Are these large differences down to the fact that there's not that much in the way of a buffering stage in the analogue output of the IQ DAC? In which case, how would it fare with something like a Musical Fidelity X-10D on the end of it, or similar buffering stage - Or can it be Lampizated? Now that sounds like a project!!

Welcome to the world of computer audio audiophillia nervousa...
The "trick"is to pick your point of exit!

[dowser]

Could this explain the poor results in a small number of cases?

Hmm - maybe, mine was tested with a 10 metre no-name interconnect (I have the Pi by the TV, not the hi fi). I give a decent interconnect a go over the weekend.

Could be...good find Richard. There's no o/p filtering or opamp from the DAC chip so what it's attached to could have a huge impact on how it sounds....

Do you have a cct diagram of the IQ Dac+?

Thanks, Richard

[Bonky]

I'm on a Mac, trying to access Alsamixer. I've opened terminal and typed in various commands as suggested but nothing works!
The Mac is connected by ethernet to a BT router and then wirelessly to my Pi +IQ Dac.

The PI runs Volumio, and is 'headless'.

Please can someone suggest in easy-to-understand terms what I'm doing wrong? (...and, yes, I have googled it).

Assume I know nothing (very nearly the truth).

Many thanks,

Richard

[lovejoy]

Welcome to the world of computer audio audiophillia nervousa...
The "trick"is to pick your point of exit!

Hahah! I've been in that world for many years! I don't seem to sit on the autistic spectrum for anything other than when it comes to audio reproduction, but then I seem to make up for it in spades. My problem is that I can quite safely say 'I'm happy with the way it sounds', but if there's nothing to tinker with, the hobby starts to get a bit boring. There will ALWAYS be the next thing to play about with!

[lovejoy]

Please can someone suggest in easy-to-understand terms what I'm doing wrong? (...and, yes, I have googled it).


Richard

Hi Richard,
The first thing is to ensure that your Mac can see the Pi over the network, so with your terminal open issue a ping command which will send a call to the Pi and if they can see each other, the Pi will respond, so type:
ping <IP address of your pi>
e.g.
ping 192.168.0.10

The Mac will now send ping commands every second or so until you tell it to stop (ctrl + c). A successful response will look something like:

Richard$ ping 192.168.0.10
PING 192.168.0.10 (192.168.0.10): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 192.168.0.10: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=0.062 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.0.10: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.121 ms

Those time measurements at the end tell you how long it took from sending the request to returning the response, and all is good if you can see this.

If you see something like:

Richard$ ping 192.168.0.4
PING 192.168.0.4 (192.168.0.4): 56 data bytes
Request timeout for icmp_seq 0
Request timeout for icmp_seq 1
Request timeout for icmp_seq 2

Then your Mac cannot see the Pi, so you can't go any further until you can get ping responses. If this is the case then the problem will lie somewhere in your network configuration:
1. Check that the IP address of the Pi is what you think it is - If the network configuration is set to DHCP then it may change every time the Pi is rebooted. It is for this reason, I always use static IP addresses so you know where everything is. Volumio has DHCP switched on by default, but you can easily set up a static IP configuration in the Network page of the web interface.
2. Ensure the Mac and the Pi are sharing the same subnet, i.e. if your Mac is on 192.168.0.something, then your Pi will also want to be on 192.168.0.something. If any of the first three numbers (octets) differ, then they occupy different subnets and will have trouble seeing each other, unless you start getting into more complex routing methods (which you don't want to do).
3. Following on from 2. check the netmask value (this usually appears underneath the IP address for each device). Firstly, this value should be the same on every device. If it is different then you may start to get problems. Most commonly this value should be 255.255.255.0. A netmask is a pretty good descriptive term. You are applying a mask over the network to each device - The holes in the mask - i.e. the zero - means that the device can see everything else no matter what the value is in this octet, whereas the 255 values mean that if the octet number for that field differs from the one being used by that device for any other device, it is masked and one won't see the other.

Following these rules should get to a point where you can ping, so once you've got there, you should be able to log into your Pi with the command

ssh -l pi <IP address of your Pi>
upon which you will be asked for your Pi password.

Hope that helps,
Rich

[lovejoy]

Having written all of that and having only recently switched over to wireless myself (you could say another attack of audiophilia nervosa), I've noticed that with Moode at least (this may be the same for Volumio, or may not), that the network configuration does not seem to allow you to set a static IP address for the Pi, so it's DHCP all the way, which means you may have some trouble finding which IP address your Pi has been assigned.

There is a handy piece of free Mac software for this called Angry IP scanner. Download that, run it and in the Ip Range box enter the start and end of your network range - It will probably fill this in for you automatically, so all you have to do is click Start. Look down the list until you see a hostname called Volumio and that will give you your IP address.

[struth]

if you run your bband provider router ip add in a browser it should tell you whats connected and what has been asigned what ip add. you can change it to static there