A beginner's guide to Raspberry Pi streaming

[Music] so today we're in my kitchen because I want to talk about raspberry pies not baking them but the computer version so this is a raspberry pie and essentially what this is is a small board computer it's an entire computer a bit like your MacBook or your laptop or the desktop you have but lower power lower processing power that is dialed down into a much smaller form factor so most of the action takes place on this Broadcom chip here this is called a system on a chip so CPU and RAM and things like that I think on this chip I could be wrong but basically this is an entire computer that has the CPU and the RAM built-in for storage there's only this thing micro SD card now this as we'll see in a moment determines what our small board computer what our Raspberry Pi does obviously this is an audio hi-fi channel so we're going to be talking about how to use this as a network streamer so today I want to tackle the Raspberry Pi a beginner's guide to the Raspberry Pi as a network streamer now we're going to see a lot of gear on the way because this is not a review of those individual components I don't have the time to talk a lot about how this DAT compares to that deck or this board compares to that board I might just use very simplistic terms like this is better than this in the main so be prepared for that because I really want to show the process of what you need to do to get up and running and some of the things you can consider to improve the sound of your Raspberry Pi as a network streamer now here I have a Raspberry Pi in its official plastic case you can see it in here and you can see the micro SD card in the back so we've got HDMI don't use it very much this thing here is the five volt input so if we have a power brick this is how this thing is powered it's like a five volt input like that always pretty much always anyway and and then on this side ethernet and four USB ports so you can see how this is a fairly tidy little computer solution and people use raspberry PI's all over the world for all sorts of things I think they were originally developed for school kids but our focus obviously is audio so if we think about the audio on this thing we can just hook up the three and a half mil socket here and use the internal Dax there's a deck inside here that converts digital to analog and then just hook this into our hi-fi system obviously we have to connect either Ethernet some of these things do Wi-Fi now before we go further with hardware we need to talk about software because you might remember to start I mentioned micro SD card what we put on this determines what the hardware will do or how the hardware will be used there are a whole host of operating systems Linux based operating systems that we can write this SD card so there are options for roon Squeezebox UPnP there's a whole host of them there are literally hundreds we're gonna look at three now I think three yeah and I'll show you how to get the operating system onto here [Music] [Music] [Music] so this this is voluma oh this an operating system for Raspberry Pi it's also available for other different small board computers but if you want to download that we've clicked out there Pike or player is good for squeeze box emulation or squeeze box server my favorite rune bridge or rune ready operating system is called ropey I use this quite a bit so let's say we download this so we can get the latest for up you from here and it's downloading down here this is the bin file and what we're going to do is we're going to write this file to our micro SD card an image file basically like an operating system image and it that sounds complicated but it's really not and it's not because of some software that I use called bailina ichiya it used to just be coupled etcher I think it was bought by different company I'm not sure so we can open this so what we can do first of all so while that's still downloading connect our micro SD card here to an adapter because it needs to be USB see because this is a macbook and connect it in like that so now the Mac course see that that card is connected and we've still got 39 seconds almost there talk amongst yourselves and there we are now done and that's a 2 gigabyte file so we select it we say select our image now either downloads folder so there it is ropey OS and there's the version being is the image file click open then generic storage media it's already found 2 micro SD card a gigabytes on there and then we click flash and then I have decided my password here so this is already secret and you can see it starting it's flashing now so it's writing ropey OS on to micro SD card this takes a few minutes [Music] [Music] I've written the operating system now to this microSD card I can put it inside the pie so like that so this is ready to be booted up I mean we connect the ethernet we connect the audio out we connect the power we start it up rupee is a little bit unusual in itself configures so take some time so don't be too impatient with it there's information on the Ruby website about that but then this is now a rune ready endpoint so this is 35 euros for the Raspberry Pi board I think it's about 10 euros for the case and then the power supply is another 5 euros 8 euros so we've got a room ready endpoint for about 50 euros just over and I think that's really cool but the thing is we're using the internal dark inside here now that's built just a function just to create sound it's built to a price is built to the form factor of the board here and in fact we can do a lot better and that's where things like it's the audioquest dragonfly black come in because instead of using the internal DAC we can have this or up raise our deck so we connect that to the PI so this is a hundred euros and then we get a cable again and sort of instead of going from here where we were before we use the DAC inside the AudioQuest dongle and that gives us a much better sound not just a little bit better I'm much better I mean you need a reasonably okay high fighters and to hear this or headphone system I think most people would now obviously we don't have to use dongle Dax like this with the USB connector built in we can take a USB cable like this and then we connect that to here and that means now we can bring in our $100 ship mode III DAC and now we have a different kind of room ready streamer so this takes care of the digital streaming it sends the digital audio along the USB cable into this DAC and then we connect the back to our hi-fi or headphone system using these two RCA sockets here so all up roon ready streamer here a very good sounding room ready streamer is about a hundred and fifty euros haul up roughly [Music] so back to our naked raspberry-pi we can connect a USB DAC to any of these four USB ports here but the beauty of the Raspberry Pi ecosystem is that we can add things like this this is this is a hat Hardware attached on top so this is a DAC this is a DAC board made by a low it's called the boss tack again like the like the AudioQuest it's designed with sound quality in mind unlike the DAC inside the pie and this connects using the 40 pin riser here on to the Raspberry Pi so I'm careful not to break it so what's going on here okay so what this board does is it pulls up the digital audio received by the PI and then this board decodes the audio and sends it out through these two RCA's here into your amplifier and that's pretty cool and I'd say this boss DAC was kind of on the level of the audio quest dragonfly black or the mode III I don't want to get into the my new share of these products here because this is a more of a general video but this kind of setup really opens us up to more possibilities now obviously a low are not the only company that make DAC boards like this there are many different kinds of DAT boards so you don't have to just pick this one I think this sells for about 60 euros so it's actually a more affordable way to get better sound out of the pie and sharp observers wouldn't have noticed that no longer can we put this inside here you can get acrylic cases for this and you can you can actually buy this like pre-built inside a case with a Valu meow operating system on the card here but I wanted to pull that apart I hate the look at the accredit cases I think they look cheap and nasty so yeah mine's over there but this is what it looks like on the inside I think this is very cool this is a very decent way to pull audio out of our pie [Music] so you'll notice there are no physical buttons on a Raspberry Pi so if we want to control it we can't you know volume up volume down on here or anything like that that's why we're connected to the network so we control it over the network using a smartphone app or a desktop app so a computer or phone so behind me here in the white - Rex rack on the top I've set up a Raspberry Pi based streamer connected it to my amplifier and it is running the ropey software that we installed earlier on so it shows up in roon in the settings so I've got this running here as a and we can see this here this is a it says boss DAC so that's the yellow bus stack on the top of the Raspberry Pi but yeah so I can now control that I can stream room content to it but how do I not install the rupee in it so if I go in for the Squeezebox OS with the pike or player or if I'd gone for the loomio I'd use different smartphone apps the Squeezebox one I can use Squeezebox app so I use what's it called I use orange squeeze on an Android phone on an iPad I prefer I paying and voluma is accessible through a web browser so either on phone desktop so there are many ways to control it but they have to be done across the network using third-party devices [Music] [Music] just pop the lid off this one this is a Raspberry Pi underneath here there's a hat on top sign another ad on board but this one is not a DAC board this is a made by a company called just boom and what it does is it pulls the digital audio up from the Raspberry Pi and converts it into Toslink and coaxial so then then we can use these connections for our data so if we don't have a USB DAC we want to go Toslink or coaxial into our DAC we can use these two and Toslink is quite unusual I think on a Raspberry Pi Hat board like this I mean I've used this with the court mojo actually so I went as link from this into tussling here and so again we have a nice stack and this vid goes on here I'm not putting it back on because it's actually a real pain to get off now if you're the kind of person that thinks that digital audio is just ones and zeros it's all the same then you can stop watching now because you're done we're done because the next thing I'm gonna talk about is differences in digital audio and that may offend your sensibilities so please don't add me in the comments I'm giving you fair warning here [Music] so inside this metal box is as you can see here from the ports there's a Raspberry Pi there is also as you can see here a hat on top that's called the digi one it's also made by a low the same people that made this bus DAC and it kind of looks like that inside here but it doesn't have a DAC on board it doesn't have analog outputs instead we have digital outputs and what the board does is it improves the quality of the digital signal coming out from the coax the BNC we can use either or here and that way I can then connect this to any DAC that has coaxial input so for example ship mode III it's coaxial input is here so I could put these two together cable it from here to here so some of you might be asking well why would I use this and not this and of course if those of you who I said you'd stop watching now are still watching and you still think that ones and zeros is all that digital audio is about you will think that these two things sound the same and they don't so when I connect this one to a DAC I get a better yeah better quality signal a better quality sound then when I connect this one to a DAC it's a small difference but it still matters to me and it matters to many other people so what's wonderful about the world of Raspberry Pi with the network streaming angle is that we can have coaxial or if we need Toslink we can add Toslink here very easily or we could have a DAC like this on here or we could still just use the USB outputs here and go into dragonfly Modi mojo that kind of thing but this is the big difference really and I think this is I think for digital audio enthusiasts like me this is important is that the USB output on a Raspberry Pi it's not great it doesn't sound all that good it's got this hardness to it this sort of metallic sheen which we don't get from here [Music] so I know I said I wouldn't get into the technical nitty-gritty of sound quality and things like that but uh I'll end on these thoughts so for me this is this is the bluesound node to I and it has digital outputs analog outputs and I think the digital outputs on this a low streamer just a little bit smoother than on this blue sound and also say if you put together this alone with this DAC you've got a solution that sort of operates in the same ballpark as this is a standalone box and obviously if you swap out the for the Mojo it's kind of like that then this for me is more resolving cleaner more transparent than this in terms of analog outputs however you buy the bluesound node to I if you're not comfortable with burning a burnin yeah I guess you could call it burning because the stuff is called burn basically writing an operating system to the micro SD card which I showed earlier so if you think all of that is a bit of a bit of a pain in the ass but you can be for many people I understand that or if you have to choose a software or you don't know what operating system so you buy the bluesound node 2i because you want a completely pre-configured solution so it's room ready but then using the blue-ice app you get tidal or qobuz Deezer Amazon maybe Amazon I think Amazon anyway this is for people who don't like computers don't want to mess around with they're kind of the more fiddly nature of Raspberry Pi building but if you're okay with the sort of fiddly nature of raspberry pi system compilation you know putting hats together writing micro SD cards you know worrying about connections then you can save a little bit of money and sometimes get a better sound so you have to decide which one of these sort of setups is right for you this video is about a beginner's guide to Raspberry Pi but I just wanted to close by putting this stuff in context with more consumer focused products that come to market anyway if you found this video in any way useful please give us a thumbs up a like down here if you like this kind of video I'll do one of these every few months I think like a beginner's guide to yeah if you like that then please subscribe to this channel to get notifications and as always thank you so much for watching

Channel: Darko Audio

Views: 394,731

Keywords: Audio, streaming, High-End Audio, Audiophile, head-fi, porta-fi, sound quality, Darko, reviews, show reports, berlin, techno, tidal, spotify, qobuz, rpi, raspberry pi

Id: 3BUjj2mZ4o0

Length: 20min 36sec (1236 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 27 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/cherno_electro]

this was interesting, up until the part when he claimed that digital audio isn't just "ones and zeroes". He thinks audio being transferred via usb has a "metallic sheen".

[u/celesteit]

I’m a long time CCA customer. I have mine driving my hifi system via a Cambridge Audio DACMagic into a Rega Amp. For years I’ve been satisfied with the setup. However, the channel by John Darko, and his video on an Introduction to the raspberry pi, convinced me to have a go myself. Firstly with just the Pi connected to my Dac with USB. Then lately with a HAT from @hifiberry. I have to say that I’m completely blown away by the sound upgrade from the CCA. It’s like night and day!
So I’m grateful to John for his video and hope others are encouraged to try the same.

HIFIBerry #JohnDarko #Audio.

[u/optifrog]

no time to watch - does it do "groups" if not it is not a replacement.