What is it?
It is our very highly reviewed PecanPi® Streamer with a built-in DAC (PecanPi® DAC is Roon Tested), headphone amplifier, and the addition of a 5" touchscreen. All enclosed in a 14 gauge steel case that will be painted black.
The front of the unit will feature the 5", TFT, 800x480 pixel display.
The back of the unit will have all the connections; Ethernet, USB, XLR, etc.
Dimensions: 190 x 120 x 95mm (7.5 x 4.75 x 4in) Weight: 2 to 2.5kg (4.4 to 5.5lb)
The PecanPi® Streamer Ultra will retail for $850. Everybody who makes a deposit will get $150 off the retail price once the product launches. The deposit also guarantees that your unit will be the first to ship in time for the holiday season.
Very slick! I’ve got two PecanPi Streamers - probably the best, most cost-effective audio purchases I’ve made in awhile – running Ropieee and streaming from Roon. One of them I have tucked away such that a display would serve little purpose. But the other is sitting out and would be very handy to have a display on it.
How is Roon what’s playing displayed to it exactly? Can’t see how useful it is at all, only Ropieee manages to do this as far as I know and that only supports the offical 7" screen. You just show Volumio here does that feedback when playing from Roon?
That’s great to hear. That means that the screen will (edit: should) work with Ropieee. That seems like a good selling point and should be mentioned; especially on this forum.
Looks cool, but I have some questions/suggestions…
How will Roon users make use of the display? Will there be controls for play/pause/skip? Can you display the signal path, including sampling rate sent to the DAC along with album art? Does using the display with Roon require RoPieee (photos show Volumio)? How do you prevent the elevated CPU utilization and display’s RFI/EMI from impacting sound quality (shielding?) Have you considered using the RPi4 for this project? How about a new DAC chip that supports an SINAD closer to 120 dB? Would an external antenna enable you to support Wi-Fi with out adding significant noise? How could you add balanced and single-ended headphone jacks? Will this product support volume control in hardware (like the PecanPi USB)? What would you have to change to add support for a remote control for volume and play/pause/skip?
I like the idea, but I’d love to see some or all of these capabilities in the next turn of the crank in streamers from Orchard Audio. Thanks for listening.
Interesting that the new rPi seems to be powering the display from the ribbon cable. I had to run a separate 5V for the 7" touch screen.
@David_Snyder: I am using very similar hardware in my streamer (7" touchscreen, rPi3B+, and IanCanada’s hats). The remote is accomplished with RoPieee by using a FLIRC ir receiver that plugs into a USB port. It works really well with an IR remote I bought from amazon.
Wifi is a bit problematic on my machine because the Pi is inside my metal case and there isn’t a connector on the pi for an external wifi antenna that I could have routed out of the case. If WiFi is a selling point, making the rear plate out of black lexan would potentially solve that issue.
WRT the display, the touch screen works really well for what it is. Under Ropieee, it displays album art, track title, artist. It also shows the track length zone name and current position in the track. The controls are play/pause, FF REW, and volume. There is no other features exposed. I’m not sure if Harry is responsible for the display or if he is just passing through an image from the Roon core. I’d love to make changes to that display if possible, but it hasn’t been a high enough priority in my life to dig into how it’s working exactly.
The volume can be controlled using the screen (using Roon’s DSP functionality), therefore there is no need for the HW knob anymore. The volume control with the knob works identically to the DSP functions just bypasses Roon completely. I think it would be confusing if you turn the knob and see no volume setting change on the screen.
The screen will give you the standard Ropieee display, see the picture in my previous post.
An RPI4 takes way too much power and therefore generates a lot of heat. It provides zero benefits to audio quality.
Did you know that Ropiee already has two supported remote controls? I will add this info to my documentation when the product is out…
This display is not officially supported by Ropieee but works just fine. This is because the company completely reverse engineered the official 7" display interface.
To Ropieee and the Rpi the display looks just like the 7" one.
Any display that mimics the Rpi 7" display interface will work. There are a bunch of them around.
@Orchard_Audio, one of the reviewers of the original PecanPi streamer mentioned you will notice SQ degredation when you switch to digital volume(Roon DSP). Do you think that is true? And if you recommend to connect it to a preamp? Thanks
@Shahryar_Sedghi
There have been many changes to the device since the original version. Also, I am not sure why the reviewer would say such a thing when Roon’s DSP volume control should actually have higher performance than the one internal to the DAC. This is because Roon’s DSP volume control is 64-bits the one internal to the DAC is less.
Since the addition of the screen, the volume control on the DAC will be disabled. Now that you can control the volume on the screen I don’t see the need for a knob.
I see no issue with connecting the streamer directly to a pre-amp. My recommendation for best performance is to connect the streamer directly to the amplifier. The fewer components you have in the audio path the better. Each component adds noise and distortion to the audio chain.
Are you saying that you do NOT have hardware volume control on the board? You are not using the hardware settings in alsamixer? So as the volume goes down you are effectively just truncating bits?
