Hifiberry dac2 HD and the dsp expansion card

Tinkering
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I am going to setup a new zone here at the homestead. Instead of buying another smsl dac, I was planning to use a RaspberryPI with a dac hat. That way I can play around with dac hats which for the most part don’t cost a heck of a lot. Ok, my question is this… would the dac2 HD benefit from adding the dsp card? Can Roon use it if I install it or would it just be unused hardware? If its only for digital volume control, I’m not seeing the benefit since I have a remote to turn the volume up/down via my marantz.

I will using hqplayer for my listening room, but only roon in the living room so for that all up sampling will be done via roon.

Have you guys played around with some of the off brand dac hats? Do they work under roon?

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Roon can’t use the DSP card.

Your roon core has plenty of DSP abilities if there is something you are looking to do.

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Thank you for the reply. Ok, that will save me from making an 80 dollar mistake. I’ll start with the hifiberry dac2 hd and go from there. There are some that use ess chips and I can’t wait to listen to those. I’ve been looking at the dacs listed on the ropieee hardware page and there are a couple or three that I am interested in playing with.

One thing that I am going to do with this is to use the iancanada purepi 2 power board. That looks to be very interesting for quiet power.

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I bought a few of these for non crucial zones (ceiling speakers in my bathroom / shower / kitchen) , they generally work fine. I bought before this review was published.

Performance is still OK, although not as exceptional as one might hope. For my usage this isn’t an issue.

There are two issues:-

  1. There are pops when changing sample rates. To avoid this I just set roon to up sample everything to 192.

  2. If not using Hi Fi Berry’s own OS build, there is a driver issue which affects Ropieee (and perhaps others) it can cause the volume to drop to 0 when using device volume. I found a workaround using two roon remotes. Hold the volume at max with one remote, and change to Fixed / DSP volume with the other. May take a few tries. Once sorted it is stable across Ropiee updates etc.

I think Allo’s Hats are better, but the company is no longer active.

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