Roonbridge Raspberry Pi 4 usb sound problems over 44khz

[Daniel_Rourke]

I am running a Raspberry Pi 4 out of USB. The same problem exists whether I use RopieeeXL or VitOS (latest builds)

My DAC is a NAD D 3045 with asynchronous USB input (I also tried a couple of different USB cables, same issue)

Running Rune from a Lenovo Laptop on external hard drive over ethernet

Description Of Issue

Any tracks I play that are over 44khz (e.g. 96 or 192) sound awful, like a robot voice being pushed through a radio transmission from a submarine. This only seemed to affect Qobuz tracks, though not sure if the problem is Qobuz itself or the khz / bitrate of its tracks (all my own flacs are 44khz and play fine, the Qobuz tracks at 44khz I tried play fine).

I messed around, including changing from VitOS to Ropiee, rebooting my entire system, fiddled with the DSP sample rate conversion etc. and nothing seemed to work. I managed to get some response by changing the stream to Chromecast over optical (which sounded fine) and then back to the Raspberry Pi 4 bridge and then that seemed to sound fine too. Super confusing.

Any idea how I can bug fix this, or have I missed some obvious setting somewhere? Thanks

[Michael_Harris]

Daniel I run running VitOS (and Ropieee) and am running 96 and 192 through usb with no issue.
Things to check for, usb cable quality, pi power supply and any issues with the Nad taking a usb signal above 44khz

Do you have another computer that you can check this Roon output with?

Regards

Mike

[Daniel_Rourke]

I changed some more settings, and chose DSD over PCM (DoP) as the output format. This seems to have worked, for now. I will keep track.

[Daniel_Rourke]

The problem returned after a couple of reboots. DoP hasn’t solved it at all.

Pulling my hair out here.

[KMM]

Here are my settings if that is of any help. Roon core to Raspberry 4GB, then via USB to Denon DA 300.

Up-sampling set to 192 kHz which equals the max. the Denon will accept via USB. No issues whatsoever.

[Daniel_Rourke]

I am not entirely sure what my issue was, but I seem to have solved it by doing a few things:

• Updating my Rasberry Pi 4 to latest firmware / EEPROM
• Using DietPi rather than VitOS or Ropiee(xl)
• Using the official power supply

For anyone having these issues, or related… I found that DietPi was a bit less prone to this behaviour than VitOS and Ropiee. I also found that the power supply makes a huge difference. Many people mention this as a matter of course, but I was not ready for how much more stable the ‘official’ power supply is. Even using a power supply with the exact same specs resulted in errors in DietPi. The official power supply works perfectly.

[noris]

Hi @Daniel_Rourke,

Thanks for letting us know you were able to resolve the issue with those changes!
If you have any further difficulties with Roon, please just let us know!

[KMM]

Come to think about it, I also had a standard 2.5 amps power supply that I replaced with an official one and re-setted everything at the same time. Well, lesson learned. Don’t mess with the recipe…
Thanks folks

[spockfish (Harry ten Berge)]

I thought long about a solution to be able to report having not enough juice. The problem is however that the detection is rather flaky on the Pi side and in the end I left it because I don’t what to create false negatives which makes people buy new power supplies because ‘RoPieee says so’

But maybe we can create something that just gives a hint that users can click away if they think it’s not relevant.

[Simon_Arnold3 (Simon Arnold)]

Funny I got put down the other day for saying one should not use a psu not to spec of the official one. It’s there for a reason.