Joey,

You're an audiophile, have you seen this product for rPi? should work the same way with these plugs.

https://www.hifiberry.com/products/

-bodhi
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Looks great. Burr Brown makes top shelf chips; I used to order white papers from them and get 30 pound boxes of documentation delivered. The other thing is the 192kHz samplerate. If you've ever heard newer releases of popular music, including some that leaked from studios and is out in the wild, it's fantastic. There's a lot of A-list artists who for decades have complained their music didn't sound as good as the studio, and now we can believe them.

Sight unseen but based on specs, these are likely worth every penny and a steal at that. For most people even 24-bit 96kHz is beyond what they'd need for quite a while.

There's a lot of consumer-types who will try say they're tone deaf and deny they have the ability to tell the difference, but if they were to close their eyes and there's a wasp in the room, they'd KNOW where that wasp was, with their ears and brain triangulating room reflections and other factors. So people's ears usually have greater perception than they give credit for, and once digital is converted to analog it doesn't take that great a stereo hooked-up to appreciate the immense improvement in sound quality. Some math-centric people claim it's 256 times the resolution of CD quality, but they probably mean there are 256 times the possible deviation from what information 16-bit 44kHz can provide. All I know for sure is that 192kHz it's over 4x clearer because units of time are measured over 4 times greater. Plus it's fairly recently that we've had the technology to capture analog sources so pristine.

There's even a hard-nosed school of thought that says you can't capture perfect sine waves under 192k! The implication being music can't be perfectly reproduced at lower samplerates. Other schools of thought say 16-bit 44.1kHz is already over the limit of high frequencies a human can hear, but there are several technical reasons 192k is preferred and why all major recording studios currently record that high. One is to minimize intermodulation distortion (and another, aliasing), where frequencies collide and make artifacts.

In the end you can mix and dither high samplerates lower and have perfectly acceptable results. But you'll never get the same results starting off that way in the recording chain.

Advice: part with the extra $10 for 192kHz ability. I parted with $1700.00 for a Fireface 800 and even though that's getting old now, I've heard things that I want you to hear.

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-= Cloud 9 =-



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 12/17/2016 10:29PM by JoeyPogoPlugE02.

try one of these instead..... but thats only if you can get to the correct GPIO pins

http://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_odkw=Audiophonics+I2S+DAC+ES9023&_osacat=0&_from=R40&_trksid=p2045573.m570.l1313.TR0.TRC0.H0.XES9023.TRS0&_nkw=ES9023&_sacat=0

pinout diag :
https://forum.armbian.com/uploads/monthly_02_2016/post-578-0-59118400-1456768124.png

reference topic :
https://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/759-tutorial-i2s-on-orange-pi-h3/?hl=es9023



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 12/27/2016 05:50AM by Gravelrash.

Interesting! So I'd take it that higher cost HifiBerry is just a trendy thing for the rPis and the above DAC gadget would be in comparable quality?

-bodhi
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bodhi Wrote:
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> Interesting! So I'd take it that higher cost
> HifiBerry is just a trendy thing for the rPis and
> the above DAC gadget would be in comparable
> quality?

If you're asking me I don't have a clue. Usually the chips they use are of great quality, even on paper regular Realtek chips are mostly audiophile quality, but the interfaces between the AD and DA and their power supply is a big mystery to me. That's why some great chips sound terrible, because some cheap components leak system electrical noise into the circuits.

24-bit for audio is a dynamic range that goes from pin drop to having your head behind a jet engine! More than any normal stereo could handle, so in theory you should never hear any noise whatsoever. Moreover the EMI and RF vulnerability in those circuits are such that you'd think they'd have a mu-metal wraparound to minimize it. Mu Metal is part copper alloy to shield radio frequencies, and part ferrite to minimize electro magnetic interference.

That might make a great discussion is how to mimimise interference with these, because they're obviously not shielded well and who know what else can leak noisy electrical interference. It's all voodoo science to me!

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-= Cloud 9 =-

bodhi Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Interesting! So I'd take it that higher cost
> HifiBerry is just a trendy thing for the rPis and
> the above DAC gadget would be in comparable
> quality?

Thats is my understanding.

The ones with transformers intrigues me. It's a double-edged sword, because on one side there's nothing like a transformer to de-couple certain electrical noise and hum, but it will always change the tone, typically a fatter midrange that a lot of people like.
Class A circuitry is a good indicator the rest of the design is high quality.

Think of this: an orchestral conductor. How many of them do you know who is deaf? Even older ones? Yet day after day they've got trumpets blaring at them and all the cymbals and everything. That's high fidelity au natural. Then there's people with dirt quality car stereos that give you a headache because of the low-quality feedback topology and they're always saying "what?" "huh?"
I ramble, but spent s lot of time in that area and knock on wood my ears are good still. The point being you can have hellaciously loud music or years on end and still be left with healthy hearing.

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-= Cloud 9 =-