Allo DigiOne and Raspberry Pi for Audiophile Digital Streaming

hi guys and welcome to my latest video now what we are going to talk about today is how to make your raspberry pi if you are using it as a music streamer into an audio file grade streamer and we're going to do that by using allo dg1 spdif interface and if all of this sounds totally unknown to you and weird you probably missed my comprehensive guide how to actually use raspberry pi as a music streamer and i'll leave that link down below this video and if you haven't watched it already if you don't know how to do that please go and take a look at that video first there i cover what you should do how to install operating system how to actually make it stream music because you can do that only with raspberry pi you can have small case you can use its own usb outputs to connect them directly to your dac to its usb input and that will work and that will work just fine actually probably a little bit better than general purpose pc i'll not repeat that anymore please take a look at that guide from few months ago on this channel but today now we are going to talk about aloe dg1 that is a hat it's a hat that means it's an add-on you can see these pins here on raspberry pi and the same thing here on low dg1 boards so we just stack them together and then we turn our plain regular bare bone raspberry into something that's much closer well probably not even much closer it actually is an audiophile grade digital source so in this video i'll just quickly go through some things that alodge one actually is and how it's doing that i'll be quick about it because this is not a paid review by alo i purchased these things myself so i'm going to focus mostly on when i actually put it in use and i use these outputs instead of usb directly from raspberry pi what do i hear what do i get for my money and talking about money actually alodge one board costs 99 bucks and that's yeah like twice the price of raspberry itself so what do you get when you buy this first of all this is only a speedy digital interface that means that you you here have two physical connections that you can use one is pretty well known coaxial rca output most of our dax most of the decks out there on the market actually have coaxial rca input so in that case you just connect it with this one some of the dax use bnc connection that is this one slightly bigger one and the signal itself is exactly the same it's spdif digital signal just connector is physically different and some decks use this bnc physical connector for example chord decks come to mind first like too cute or cutest interesting thing to say here is that you can actually mix and match if for any reason you want to do that for example you can connect cable on the rca port on one side and bnc connector on the other side or vice versa why would you do that i don't really know some people already own such cables and that's perfectly fine because the signal itself is same just the physical connection is different and they basically gave you a choice of two different connections for one and the same type of the signal now what actually makes it to supposedly sound better than raspberry pi's usb outputs just by themselves aloe says that among other things there are a lot of isolators here for example when signal goes through these pins on raspberry pi okay let me quickly connect them here okay see now they're connected it's like one hole so when raspberry pi sends the signal to dg1 board digi-1 board then uses a lot of filters some of those are galvanic isolation of the signal some of them are galvanic isolation of the power lines so by doing that they actually try to isolate any ground loops noises and things like that i don't want to get into details to be perfectly honest i didn't prepare to do that in this video and other than that there are other types of filtering here on this board that will try to get rid of all the noise and all the jitter that your audio signal would otherwise have and not just the audio signal but power lines too so what is the end game of all this talk it is that when you actually use dg1 board and you connect your deck through it and not through usb ports directing raspberry pi you should achieve better sound fidelity and get better sound in your system does it really work okay let's go to that part uh but just before we continue i wanted to say that if you like these type of videos please click that button help youtube algorithms spread them further and and help this channel grow and if you really really like them then consider visiting the patreon page and becoming a patron i would appreciate that a lot but if not hey thank you anyway okay so let's continue to the sound part i actually planned to make a sound demo with everything else in the system being the same just in one instance i feed my deck through usb port from pi in other instance i feed it from dg1 board and i will do that probably in a few days next week i will upload that sound demo if i manage to capture the sound difference with my recorder because that's not easy you know there's so much layers of compression but i'll try to do that to give you the chance to hear that for yourself but until that i'll try to explain the differences to the best of my abilities and when i actually bought this lodg one for the first time i didn't know what to expect me like for many other people digital signal was something that was supposed to be very difficult to pollute and something that shouldn't have much influence on my hi-fi system that's why i buy dax and good amplifiers and good speakers digital is digital at least i thought so but when i bought this board for the first time i set everything up i connected it to my deck and i really did notice a sound that was different than before and i'll try to explain how first of all i know this will probably sound like a cliche but somehow background was a little bit darker and what sounded through usb a little bit more like a vol sound don't get me wrong it was still great sound but it sounded a little bit more like a wall now became a little bit more three-dimensional i realized that a lot of things going on in the recording had a little bit more space around them it's not by much it's not by a huge margin but it's definitely noticeable so i played some songs that i know very well and i realized that for example things that should be prominent like a lead singer they're still prominent clean and great but some other instruments that previously i felt were just behind the singer just so close to the singer behind her off from her back a little bit better and i realized well man that double bass it's not so close to her it's not like they touching themselves it's double bass is a little bit further behind and it also sounds cleaner i hear note vibrating with more clarity and more precision and the same goes for guitar and for drums and for other instruments and in a first moment it's a little bit weird because my experience was that the sound overall like the volume was a little bit lower because some of the instruments took a step back they were slightly cleaner but i was used to that wall of sound presentation that was coming through usb output so i naturally took my remote i cranked the volume up a little bit and i realized it's not tiring first of all because of all that space and more background darkness and more clarity and layering around instruments i could actually increase the volume and not get tired and not get overwhelmed that easily and when something actually really explosive happens in the recording something some really strong punch of the drum something like that that is of the same loudness as before things that should be prominent and that should be allowed they stay loud and prominent and that leads me to the second part which is allodge one actually provided me slightly increased dynamic that thing that i thought that volume was slightly lower for some instruments that are leading instruments it's not actually but for some more subtle details it feel like it is and you feel like the sound as a hole is slightly more relaxed and and slightly more laid back so you crank the volume up a little bit you hear everything again really great you hear even more space around everything and i realized i hear more reverbs i hear more echoes tiny echoes around the instruments and that's the moment when i know this is actually not taking anything from the sound and from the signal it's just taking something that wasn't supposed to be there before something that was slightly hazing these instruments and their natural reverbs and echoes in the recording studios and from that darker and more spacious soundstage somewhat more relaxed without any tiring effect without any negative effect you crank the volume a little bit more everything still stays calm and clear and with pretty dark background but things that are prominent somehow become more prominent and more jumpy and more energetic and to be perfectly honest that's my biggest uh impression i cannot tell you oh you hear more subtle details you hear things that you never before heard in the recording when it comes to just those tiny high frequency details to be perfectly honest i don't hear them more when it comes to just um a string and details and fingers moving over string or things like that i don't hear more of that and they had a lot of friends visiting me and usually their first impression is that that same impression dg1 sounds dynamic they don't say oh it sounds more subtle it sounds more detailed they sell they say it sounds more dynamic it somehow sounds lively and punchy and energetic and if i switch back to usb for them they say oh yeah this is like hazier everything like melted a little bit and just that sound stayed shrinked and and they all acknowledged that it's not by much they say this is still very good sound but once you hear that expansion of the space and that expansion of dynamics it's so easy to to get hooked to that you know because it's addictive and your brain and your ears know that that's how the real life works in real life we don't have equalizer that will equalize all the sounds at the roughly same level and put them at the roughly same plane i know some people like that it might be pleasant it it might be good for easy background listening especially at lower volumes when you just want to hear everything without paying too much attention on space and don't on dynamics but when i'm engaged into listening to the music when i want it to be engaging and real life energetic and spacious i definitely feel that alodge one is a great upgrade that makes your convenient and very useful raspberry pi streamer into something that you can really call audio file grade digital source and i didn't have this experience first hand unfortunately i was trying to arrange that but it just didn't work but i have a an acquaintance that he has a pretty good ear i trust him he was using a blue sound node streamer that is respectable streamer a lot of reviewers and listeners and buyers are happy with its sound and that device costs around four five hundred bucks but after some time he tried raspberry pi with dg1 board and with low noise power supply and he called me and he said hey this sounds better than my blue sound node i asked him better in which way he said blue sound node sounds nice and calm and everything is there nothing is sharp nothing nothing is edgy but this one actually has more energetic edges it has more dynamics it's slightly more detailed and and just punchier sounding and he sold his blue sound and he actually bought into this whole raspberry pi upgraded to be to be audiophile grade streamer and that's great i i bought into that too now for the last part of this video i'll finish just by saying that when you make this contraption like this of course you have to put it into some sort of casing and for that you can use aluminum case but the cheaper solution is a acrylic case like this one i don't want to assemble it in front of the camera it would be quite a long trip but in the end it looks something like this there are sides and everything you put everything here and you have like a plastic casing it's fully functional everything works okay you just insert the cables that you need it works you control it through your smartphone but for all that details please watch that raspberry pi as a streamer guide that i filmed few months before this was focused on aloe dig one and what can i tell if you have like a really really entry level system i'm just throwing number here numbers here but let's say that you have a hundred bucks back maybe 200 bucks amp and 200 bucks speakers i don't know if this would be something that i would recommend to you maybe i would say if you want to upgrade something buy better deck buy better speakers play with that but if you're already at some reasonably decent level and and i would say that if you already spent more than five six seven hundred bucks on your whole hifi system it would probably be able to show the difference between digital source directly from raspberry pi and digital source from a audiophile grade hat like alodge one now this is not the only one on the market there are others like hi-fi barry that's another company there are solutions to actually if you really want to use usb if you maybe have a usb only dac there are other types of solutions to actually make raspberry into an audiophile grade streamer that still uses usb as an output allo produces something like that it's called usb bridge but that's a little bit trickier to do i think it's more expensive that can be topic of some other video if i get my hands on that device but for now what i really wanted to say if that you have a decent hi-fi system and you use digital source as your main source i think this is a really nice 99 bucks upgrade and for any reasonably transparent system and for any reasonably critical listener it should make a really nice uplift in the sound quality now as i said i will try to record all of this i will try to record the sound coming from the usb and then the sound coming from ldg1 with my system that you see here around me and i will try to put that video a few days later because i know people are really suspicious when you're talking that doing something in a digital domain affect sound because especially that's so difficult to prove in theory it's so difficult to explain but it's a real thing it's happening and a lot of people that basically just believe their own ears can hear it easily and even best thing than believing other people and believing me if if you can hear some sort of difference and i'll try to do that video really soon but until then thank you for watching this if you liked it please feel free to leave the comment down below tell me if you want to hear more about upgrading raspberry pi we can talk about linear power supplies i don't know if you see this one here i have a really good linear power supply currently i'll i'll try to make the video about that too and then again sound demo about that too because it's always good if you can hear something for yourself but that would be all for today thank you for watching see you next time [Music] bye [Music] so you

Channel: iiWi Reviews

Views: 23,571

Keywords: Raspberry, Allo, DigiOne, streaming, streamer, audio, guide, how to, know how, audiophile, hifi, stereo, digital, DAC, iiwi, iiwireviews

Id: rkTmtamM-Hw

Length: 23min 25sec (1405 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 06 2021