Is 4GB enough for Roon or should I take the 8 GB version?
You’re OK with 4GB…
If you are only going to run Ropieee, even the 1GB will be sufficient
Problem is… no Raspberry Pi4 available at the moment in my region…
WiiM Pro via Chromecast even better, and only £50 more (it does Ethernet too). I have both - they sound the same, they just have different connectivity. And both sound better than the RPi4. I was quite surprised by how much. Even more if you juice it with an iFi iPower or similar (+£50).
The Mini is optical out, the Pro optical and coax (the analogue output is passable but no more). Have a look at both reviews on my website for more info. I haven’t posted a link as that feels too obvious
I’d forgotten that. Although, purely by coincidence (honest), I was listening to DSOTM via Chromecast / WiiM Pro just before reading your comment. So I went back to it and played through the end of each track. First attempt it was gapless on all tracks apart from 2-3. Second time it went from 1 - WYWH?? Third time it played gaplessly all the way through.
Might be worth pointing out to the OP that the Pro does Airplay 2 as well.
do you have an available ethernet connection, or is wifi required?
the on-board wireless for the pi4 is not great
if you have ethernet … the NanoPi Neo is cheap (often on Amazon for about $35 US) and works well with ethernet and a usb dac (dragonfly or similar) … total cost of the Neo + a dragonfly black is comparable to the wiim pro, and the Neo is supported by DietPi OS, which makes it relatively easy to install RoonBridge etc.
mine runs RoonBridge, Plexamp, and Airplay2 (via Shairport-Sync) … photo below for reference
In what respect have you found it not great? I have had no problems and can stream DSD256 and 24/78 when required.
I use three of the RPi 4 as endpoints and think they are excellent.
You may have a different use in mind that makes the wifi not great, but for my use cases it’s really good.
apologies for the generalization … pi4 average wifi speed (~ 40Mbps) is good enough for streaming audio, but in any case wifi performance will vary … wifi latency on the pi4 is high and variable compared to my other devices, which can be an issue for applications such as multi-room
My experience: I have a RPi 4 in a Flirc case, located about 8 meters from the router in another room, connected to the 2.4 GHz band. It shows 72 Mbps link rate… This will be considerably higher when connected to the 5 GHz band. Avg ping from the Core to this RPi is 2.6 ms. I have no problem whatsoever when streaming 192/24 content from my Roon Core to this endpoint.
You are right that wifi can vary; everyone’s mileage may vary. This is very important.
For me I have ping times of < 4ms and an internal network test showed my RPi4 sustained 55 Mbit/s over a several minute test to a wired server. That’s with an extra hop to the router because I use a mesh network.
I calculated that PCM 768/32 requires 48 Mbit/s and DSD512 requires 43.75 Mbit/s so there is plenty of headroom if I wanted to use files of those type or upsample files. I may well be really lucky in having a good WiFi network, but it does show you can get low latency and sufficient bandwidth with a RPi4.
Finally had time for some additional testing …
my Pi4 appears to have wifi thermal throttling issues, and the extent to which it shows depends on how data is being transferred …
if i run an extended iperf test to a wired server, the transfer rate drops for a bit and then recovers … i think iperf sends data every second, so there might be some idle time in there?
for the iperf testing, I tried a few wifi devices (Raspberry Pi4, Raspberry Pi3, and the NanoPi R5C) … and a wired NanoPi R4S for comparison (also tested but not shown … the Pi4 wired was similar to the R4S) … only the Pi4 clearly showed the wifi throttling issue
if i transfer data using something like secure copy (scp), the Pi4 appears to throttle wifi quite a bit more … after a while the transfer will stall and wifi will not respond until things cool off … screenshot from bmon below shows an example of what this looks like
for audio streaming, i guess the impact depends on how an app is transferring data … clocked/pulsed transfer might look more like the iperf testing (in which case the Pi4 wifi throttling might not cause a noticeable issue, or at least not very often)
it’s strange that i see this only on the Pi4 … my Pi3 (which is out in the hot garage) is a bit slower on average, but it doesn’t appear to have this throttling issue … and the M.2 wifi card on the NanoPi R5C always stays in the 200Mbps range
curious if others have seen similar issues on their Pi4 … or maybe mine is defective? … all this is more reason to use ethernet if at all possible
Er, why did you say this? It’s still gapless on my Chromecast Audio (just tested it with Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here album)…
Danny’s post makes it clear that Roon delivers a gapless stream to Chromecast devices, but if the wifi network isn’t good, a gap can occur, because Roon uses small buffers.
Sorry to ask but do you receive anything from mentioning WiiM Pro?
John
Fair question, I should have covered this earlier. No, not at all.
I do have a relationship with WiiM for reviewing purposes. I also know their UK distributor, Henley Audio, well. They supplied the WiiM Pro Plus that I’m currently reviewing (to be published shortly). Both relationships are of the normal reviewer / industry type though, I get nothing in return for suggesting their products. Whenever I suggest any product, here or elsewhere, it’s based on my experience with it and because I think it could be a good fit to the particular need.
I haven’t done any sponsored work at all. Should that change I’d make it clear that I was being paid. That rather undermines reviewer impartiality though, so I have no plans to do it.
Hi Johnny,
What OS do you use on the Raspberry? And was it hard to install?
Thanks
Tobbe
I use Dietpi and have the Argon One v2 case for all of my devices.
I stumbled at first to get WiFi working so I could install it without a keyboard and monitor, but it’s pretty easy assuming everything below makes sense.
- I use Balena Etcher to write the DietPi image to the SD card.
- Then open the card on my laptop and edit two files related to WiFi and start-up to set my WiFi details.
- Then pop the SD card in RPi and start it.
- After say 10 mins you should be able to ping the IP address you set up for the wifi and then I used SSH to login.
- Finally I used the DietPi software to install Roon bridge and it was done.
If editing text files, ping and ssh all sound like nonsense to you all is not lost, but you’d need to do a bit of reading first.
I don’t have access to things right now or I’d give you more details. Happy to dig it out later if that helps you.
Excellent, many thanks. I will only use it with Ethernet, so I suppose I dont have to
- Then open the card on …
- After say 10 mins you should…
Again, thanks!!!
No problem.
It will probably be easier without wifi, but you probably want to set your IP address so you know where to login in to.
Simple enough I hope.