Category: Audio

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A Sonos Music Server with Raspberry Pi

We have been users of the Sonos wireless music system in our house for many years. It provides music to almost every room reliably and with excellent fidelity. Music can be sourced from almost any online source, or from a local cache of music files.

Our preference is to use the local source, since that does not use any of our very limited internet bandwidth. We have had these music files spread over several different computers on the network, and in lots of different formats. This created a host of problems that needed a solution to consolidate all of those files in one place. I didn’t want to use the main HTPC computer as it’s function is just to do movies and provide music to the main listening system. I also didn’t want to use an office computer as they get turned off at night.

This server needed to be small, reliable, headless (meaning no keyboard or display) and connect directly to the LAN after the hardware firewall. The Raspberry Pi turned out to be an ideal solution to the problem. In the picture you can see two small black boxes. The one with the blue light is a 500GB hard drive in a generic USB enclosure. That disk contains some 12,000 mp3 and flac music files. The other small black box is a Rasperry Pi model 4 computer. Don’t be taken in by that tiny box. It is a full featured mini pc that can do anything a desktop can do. It can run any program you desire including full office software suites.

In this case all I wanted was to connect the hard drive to the computer and then to the network, where the Sonos controller software could request the desired music from that drive. In short it works perfectly. The little Pi runs 24/7 and unless something causes the power to fail, no intervention with it is needed. Even then, I can remotely log into it to restart it if necessary, however it is setup to just start the music service on its own on boot up.

If anyone is interested in creating an NAS music server using the Pi, I will be glad to send you the instructions for doing this. It will take a bit of tinkering with some settings and editing some configuration files on the Pi, but nothing really heavy duty.

There are lots of other automation tasks I am considering for this gadget, and I will post about those later.

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A little about the system.

I have posted a bit about our home theatre set up in a couple of posts about new equipment, but this is about the overall system. This is not a surround sound movie watching system. It is a very well developed two channel stereo music system, that happens to have a video monitor.

The speakers are two pairs of Dahlquist DQ-10’s that have been mirror imaged and stacked into frames I built about 35 years ago. The speakers have every available mod done to them, along with driver rebuilds over the years. Of all the components in the system, these are the constant, I have listened to a great many systems over the years, and have yet to come across speakers that have the extended frequency range, low distortion, ability to image and ungodly dynamics of these. There are other reproducers that may excel in a small degree, but none do it all like the DQ-10’s. Large scale orchestral, choir, chamber music, vocal, jazz, even rock are all reproduced as recorded. There is also an SVS subwoofer that handles the low bass from about 80hz down to 18hz. This does relieve the main panels from having to do a lot of low bass work, thereby lowering distortion.

The primary electronics are all Emotiva. The power amps are XPA-1’s which produce a kilowatt into the 4 ohm load of the stacked DQ’s. The speakers are famous for requiring a lot of power and high current. Having that much available power means that there is never an issue with reproducing what ever dynamics are called for, yet the first watt is about the cleanest I have ever heard with the exception of some dedicated low power class A tube amps.

The preamp is a two channel XSP-1, and the DAC is a XDA-2. One of the primary points for me was that all analog signal paths in the equipment are fully balanced. Even the power amps are balanced all the way to the speakers. This results in a noise floor that is inaudible at any level.

The two other posts detail the other equipment in the system, so I won’t go over it again. The display is the last of the Panasonic Plasma TV’s. Six years ago when I acquired it, it put any LCD set to shame. Deep blacks and shadow detail, along with beautiful and subtle color. Of course since then the OLED displays have overtaken this set in so many ways, yet until it breaks completely it will stay in the system.

It has been a work in process for over four decades, but it has now come to the point that I am very satisfied, and see no further upgrades unless something dies irreparably . About all that I will do now is acoustic tweaks to the room and listening environment.

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Schiit Audio Eitr USB to SP/DIF Converter

Its not often that I absolutely love a product, but this is one of those cases. I will say that unless you have the specific need for a USB to SP/DIF digital audio converter, then don’t bother to read on. This product solves a very specific problem.

I had been using a Mac Mini for many years as the hub of our home theatre. The optical output of the Mac went straight into the DAC, and the sound was very good to excellent with that setup. The Mac died, and i decided to build a new HTPC from scratch. This computer is running Linux, so there can be some issues with interface. In this case the DAC was old enough that the USB audio out from the computer wouldn’t talk to the DAC. I didn’t want to go spend a lot of money on a new one, so I went looking for a new solution.

I had heard about Schiit Audio for some time, as a company that builds outstanding audio products that fill specific niches in the market. As it turns out they built this little box that did just one thing. It takes the USB audio feed and converts it to a coaxial SP/DIF signal to feed to a DAC. My assumption was that it would do just that. I was not expecting the WOW improvement to the sound of the system.

After putting it in the system and configuring some settings in the Ubuntu audio system, I started listening. From the very first recording I knew this was special. Everything sounded cleaner with more definition and coherence. The image tightened up to the point that every instrument or voice was in the right place and the right spacial size. Now understand, the system imaged well before, but now it was just flat amazing. I had been mostly listing to high def FLAC files because they seemed to sound so much better than CD rebook issues. With this gadget, even standard 44.1/16 FLAC files sound wonderful (if its a well recorded.).

So whats going on inside? Just connect your USB source to Eitr’s USB input, and connect Eitr’s coaxial SPDIF output to any DAC that accepts coaxial input. Now, you have complete isolation from source to DAC, together with a superb, low-jitter coaxial SPDIF interface for bit depths and sample rates up to 24/192. The Eitr features the same unique Gen 5 USB input technology as in our upgradable DACs. It’s simply the highest-performance USB input available today, with complete electrostatic and electromagnetic isolation (via transformers), self-power of all critical low-noise and reclocking sections, and separate, precision clock sources for both 44.1 and 48kHz multiples. (And if you don’t understand the technobabble, here’s the point: it works great and sounds great, too.)

If you need this, buy it cause its the best, and a bargain at 99 bucks. I would suggest you do it soon, as the product is on there list to be discontinued. Thank you Schiit Audio for a superb product.

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HTPC changes

A few years ago I started using an older Mac Mini as an HTPC computer with great success. It had all our films, music, pictures and home videos. A year ago that processor died, and I got a new Mini. This sucked. It was slow, cantankerous, video was jerky and sound was not up to par.

This time I wanted to build a unit that was bulletproof, reliable, expandable and FAST. The build started with a Silverstone HTPC case that could hold the motherboard and up to 12 SATA drives. I only use 4 spots, but have plenty of room to expand. The MB is a low end gaming board that has a claim of an excellent audio section. The processor is an AMD Ryzen 4 core at 3ghz. 16GB of Ram 12TB of disk, and a very fast SSD for the boot drive. The OS is Ubuntu 19.04.

One of the issues with the Mac is that it could only support optical digital out. That is a noisy and jittery method of sending a digital signal because there is no way to clock it. My research said the USB output would be better because it is clocked at the source. Unfortunately, my DAC was too old to handle the USB input directly, so I found the Schiit Audio Eitr that sends a coax SP/DIF signal to the DAC. Ubuntu has some configuration issues with it, but after a bit of experimentation and coding, I got it to work at all sample rates and bit depths, WOW what a difference. The sound is more focused, detailed and smooth. The sound stage is absolutely stable, and the grittiness is gone.

I can now run Kodi, and several background tasks, and the system handles it perfectly. Love the new system.