I am very new to Roon Bridge and Raspberry Pi. I just set up a Pi3, with Roon Bridge installed from within DietPi. The installation seemed to go smoothly (once I changed the firewall settings on the PC). All my network connections are wired. The music is stored on a QNAP NAS. The USB DAC is a Geek Out 450.
The problem is that I am hearing soft pops and clicks. These are not present when the Geek Out is connected directly to the PC. And they are not present when I use a Behringer USB DAC with the Pi3. Because the Geek Out runs hot, I thought the Pi3 might not provide sufficient power. But inserting a powered USB hub didn’t help.
I wonder if there’s a setting that would address the problem.
Any suggestions? I don’t know why the Geek Out would behave differently when connected to the Pi3 compared to the PC. I’ve begun to wonder if there is a hardware problem with the Geek Out or the Pi3 board. They sound lovely between clicks every 30 to 60 sec. The sound when substituting the Behringer DAC is pretty muddy, so the intermittent clicks could be hidden in its muffled sound.
I believe could be related to kernel USB driver, or, buffer.
Before we play with kernel versions, its probably best to see if we can debug the pop’s. After you experience the pops, please paste results of the following:
dmesg | grep usb
Also in Roon, have you tried increasing the audio buffer size?
@esskay
I own a Geekout 100 and had similar problems. It seems the v1 is not fully UAC2 compatible. In Windows you need drivers (newest W10 upgrade has UAC2 support). I don’t have roon. I use Moode Audio Player with my Pi3. To eliminate the clicks i just have to resample everything to something different than 16/44.1 with the builtin SoX resampler. I used 32/384.
For my spotify-connect-web service i defined a virtual alsa audio device “geekout” with automatic resampling, for ex. in “~/.asoundrc” or “/etc/asound.conf”
pcm.geekout {
type plug
slave {
pcm “hw:G1V5”
rate 88200
format “S32_LE”
}
}
Just before i found this solution i bought an allo Boss I²S DAC and i can recommend it for its sound quality and low energy consumption. Geekout needs ~3W.
I contacted LHLabs. They said they don’t support Linux- surprising since the manual says only that drivers aren’t required for Linux and Mac. I should soon have time to try upsampling and substituting another USB DAC.
I am cautiously optimistic that it is working now. If so, it would be due to recent updates to dietpi (probably), or roon (less likely). As with any flaky problem, it could be just hiding intermittently. I’ll post again if it recurs.
