I’ve found Ropieee to be an excellent, stable solution. More stable than Dietpi or Volumio.
I use the Pi with WiFi only, as the Ethernet and USB share a bus. Found some solid improvement with that, an iFi power supply and USB iSilencer.
I’m my experience, some of the issues are the USB drivers in the unit and the USB chip in the DAC. My PS Audio Sprout 100 would not play ball with the Usbridge, but worked perfectly with the Pi.
The Usbridge is hamstring by the kernel that the Sparky is limited to and is unstable enough that I’ve put mine in the closet.
I have worked with RPi in various incarnations (with HifiBerry Dac+, Digi+, Allo DigiOne, Boss) and this has worked rock solid with Ropiee.
In my main system I have experimented a lot with various ways to feed my DCS Puccini digital in and make it work in my ROON setup. The best sounding solution was with the Allo USBridge connected to my Scarlatti Clock USB input. I haven’t tried the DCS bridge yet because I’m contemplating to make the jump to a DCS Rossini.
I did have a few issues with USBRidge last year (freeze, not being able to reboot, not recognising the clock/dac) but this seems to have stabilised over the past 6 months. I haven’t had a single issue since my last complete re-flashing of the Sparky December last year.
In all my systems I have found a good improvement with using the iPower supplies from iFi. They are very good value for money. I still want to set up a comparison with a good linear power supply one day but haven’t found the time for that yet.
Depends on how good the DAC is. A good dac will take the pi standard USB feed just fine. A less good dac less so. My RME ADI2 FS DAC takes any old signal just fine. The stock Pi comfortably outperforms the optical from Google CCA. Thought about some allo pi based stuff but the sound from stock pi is so good and i dont subscribe to the SPIDF is better dogma and the allo one i looked at (the one with two powersupplies/batteries) only had spidf i think. anyhoo YMMV.
Nice kit.always wanted to try DCS as it sounds right up my street from descriptions. Could you quantify how much a step down the base pi is using just built in usb straight to the DCS? If it is say 95% as good for example. Or qualitively what changes to the sound doe the step down/step up make? You have a very revealing system so i’m sure any small change would be big to your ears. Thanks. Matt
I started this thread with the goal of building our own end points. We were able to do well with the Raspberry Pi, especially with some of the Allo hats and better power supplies, and we can still build them, if needed.
Now that Roon works perfectly with the Linn DSM models, which simply ourperform anything else we have listened to, that has become our go to solution.
That was for the pi2/3 which had its issues due to the shared bus with ethernet fine on WiFi though. Pi4 has solved all that. I have the RME and I agree it handles it all with out dramas and sounds the same regardless of input I use a Pi4 in two different zones these days. But I found the pi3 temperamental via USB back then.
The step up from RPi straight into the Scarlatti USB to using the Sparky/USBridge was quite noticeable. I find it hard to put a percentage on it. The difference is bigger than the changes I’ve observed between various digital interconnects for example.
And it is certainly not like ‘it works just fine’. Even though the DCS Scarlatti has a very high quality Async USB interface (developed in-house, not a standard chipset implementation), the changes are well noticeable.
My later experiments with power supplies and taking the streaming interface out of the chain entirely, make me believe that the differences are not so much about the data connection itself. It is much more about noise that gets into the system through ground connections and the power lines. The Sparky produces less noise and the USB connection is better separated.
Moving my TV, BD player and Hue light-strip power connectors to a separate (filtered) power group resulted in similar improvements.
In the meantime I have moved on to the DCS Rossini. Now that is a significant step up!!
I had never expected that digital audio still could see such significant quality developments.
