Raspberry Pi 4 Hi-res Audio Case. Moode Audio test.

okay so i've been sent another case this time it's from geekworm and this one's different to all the cases i've had before it's an aluminium case and i've had loads of aluminium cases before but this one is definitely all about audio and about high-res audio so this comes with this board uh you can see it says music on there and it's got a couple of phono sockets and also another three and a half mil jack and it actually says headphone amp on there and this just sits on the top of the pie and so i've got my one gig pie that you've seen in a recent video if you've seen that and it basically just slots together there's nothing extra to it it is literally that is how it connects together and that's how it becomes a high-res music player but because it's all about audio they want it to be completely silent so the heatsink on this is a solid bit of aluminium that fits on top of the pie so there's no noise at all let's have a look at a few of the other bits so there's all these standoffs that come in here and some rubber feet as well comes with some instructions and if you scan in the qr code it will take you to their wiki page which has got all the information on it and there's a few extra bits on here it's designed for the pi 4 but you can also use it with a pi 3 but not with the case so the board will fit on the pi 3 but the case won't help you and it says on here different operating systems that work mood audio player osmc open elect raspbian jesse volumio and pi core player so before i build it up let's go through some of the specs as it says in the start here uh we redesigned the dac expansion board and tried our best to make this stack the thinnest and matched nuc style aluminium alloy shell the final thickness of dakpara is only 31 millimeters so it uses a high quality pcm5122 dac chip supports full hd audio up to 24 bit 192 kilohertz playback also has a high quality audio headphone amplifier so i'll have to try that later class leading audio 112 decibel signal noise ratio and total harmonic distortion of 0.0019 percent sounds pretty decent and it's powered by the standard raspberry pi power supply now they do talk about and i always get this with aluminium cases where people do talk about the impact on wi-fi they do say as our test 2.4 g wi-fi was usable but different raspberry pi individuals have different degrees of wi-fi interference i don't really know how i can test the wi-fi my router is in the same room and i've not had an issue with any of the cases i've had but obviously if you have weak wi-fi in the place that you're going to use it that might affect it you can take the heatsink off and that might improve the wi-fi reception a bit but i guess it's one of those things you have to try so here's the instructions let's put it together so it looks like this is very easy so i'm going to take this off to start the other bit that comes off nicely so no tools come with this but this kit i bought and i've shown it in a few videos now i've used this for loads of things since it is absolutely brilliant it was difficult to get the clear bit off and it must be this way around for the gpio pins and it screws from underneath there you go these are slightly risen and these are sort of ordinary screws in the picture it looks like you've got some aluminium bits but they don't go in there because we've already got the aluminium from the heatsink and i've got to remove this to pop it in the case and then it must be this way around yeah because the fan is at the top and then i guess we're making sure we see all of this yeah that seats nicely and then screwing in through the bottom here yeah that's all gone together nicely and there's no noise if you shake it around it's all in there very solid and all the connections are nice and accessible and also it's got a hanger so you could use a couple of screws and hang it up on the back of a monitor or on a wall or somewhere i can see these used in commercial applications quite a lot there you go so all in all in place looks pretty decent i've got some rubber feet i'm not going to put them on because i had an idea about these for another video so i'm going to use that for something else but obviously it makes sense to put the rubber feet on so i'm going to boot this from raspberry pi os the micro sd slot is here and it's actually pretty easy to get a card in but the card is flush when it's in so it is pretty difficult to get it out i can't get it out because i've only just cut my nails but if i use a small flat screwdriver and because micro sd cards have that little tiny edge so you can flip it out that way and you can see that's risen and i can get it out now a good security feature so i'm going to shut down twister and uh plug all this in i'm going to use raspberry pi os because it's the standard operating system so let's start transferring all these across well i'm not going to use the three and a half mil audio initially i'm gonna see what happens so let's let that boot up okay so i've updated the system and i've also updated pi apps and pi kiss as well because i figured that maybe one of those has some of these audio apps in it and it's just an easier way of getting to it you can see the temperature is 4950 degrees i would imagine this is overclocked this one let's have a look type in neofetch and i'm running at 2.3 or the passive heatsink i think i'm going to lower that so let's uh edit the config.txt so sudo nanobootconfig.txt and let's have a look and see what this is running at yeah 2200 so i think i'm going to drop down to [Music] 2000 maybe and where's the over voltage over voltage was set to eight i'm gonna go down to six probably could go down to four but i'm gonna leave it as it is and i'm gonna hash out this fan uh because i'm not not sure if it's gonna affect anything else because obviously i'm using some of the gpio pins press the right button so control x yes enter and then reboot so let's first have a look in pi kiss and see if there's anything to do with these audio apps that they recommend in here so i've got multimedia okay none of those are on the list so let's try pi apps okay so multimedia okay so none of them in multimedia it's always a good thing though to check pi apps and pi kiss because it is just a super easy way of installing things it's all automated so i'm going to have a look at the official website for say something like osmc because i've had that before here we go go to the download section and here we've got raspberry pi it doesn't say raspberry pi 4. that's a bit weird okay we've got raspberry pi okay so only has raspberry pi one two three three plus and zero it's a bit of a surprise i'm sure i've used omc osmc before so let's try something else what's this mood audio play i've never i've never seen anything on that before audio there's so many options on the pie mood audio player audio file quality music playback from the raspberry pi looks like a nice interface so let's click on download mood that is a long feature list okay so that download is finished now so i can uh well let's just try writing it with raspberry pi imager i'm sure that'll work so accessories and imager need to pop a micro sd card so i put one in the usb adapter and i'm putting it in the back of the pie so you'll see it show up there you go it's come up with various different things on there let's close that down loads of partitions so choose os use custom and it was mood so 1.45 gig open to storage that's my 32 gig card that i've just put in and hit right and yes okay so i've shut down raspberry pi os which was on the sd card so let's eject that and i've written mood audio to this micro sd card so let's take that out and we're going to boot from that micro sd card so switch on okay so this is how it starts up and for some reason it changes to this gray screen and doesn't seem to do anything so i played around with it for quite a while and i found out that if i pressed alt f4 that would take me back to this and it wants me to log in the username is pi and the password is m o d e audio there you go so that takes it to this screen and then i figured type in star x because a lot of things start up like that so start x and then it boots into a proper operating system with a graphical user interface but audio wise if i use the red and white connections on the back i don't get any audio through my speaker but at the moment i've got a three and a half mil jack going from my capture card because it is sending audio through hdmi by default which kind of makes sense so if i was to pick a station you can hear the audio coming through obviously i can't play very much of it because of copyright reasons but i need to change the audio output to tell it which output stage to come from and that's done i had to look this up but there's a menu here so i need to click on the m click on configure click on audio and at the top here it's the name device bit that i need so if i click on that and scroll down so i'm going to try rpi dac even though i don't know if that's the one because it's called dakpai really but let's try that so i'm going to choose set across my fingers because i haven't oh there you go restart required after restart edit chip options and or driver options well let's see if it works so if i do alt f4 and sudo power off and here you can see i've plugged my bose speaker into the two phono connections now i've got volume control as zero on here so if i press play on one of these so absolute hot it will start to play it says it's playing here summer 91 and now i need to change the audio so i don't know how yeah just click on that and then i guess i can is there a way can i drag this around okay that works that's a bit loud so that was very loud on this speaker so definitely that output stage is much louder than the raspberry pi one and obviously it's going to be a lot better quality as well right i need to try this on something else okay so this is my tv setup which is basically an apple tv uh box in the background there going through some home pods but i discovered a while back and i did a separate video on this so if you want it explained uh i'll i'll put a link in the description to that video but basically i can put analog audio through the back of my tv into the phono sockets that then is turned into an arc signal and sent out to the speakers and that's via the apple tv in this case but if you've got a normal soundbar you could use this exact same method to send an analog signal through your soundbar even if you haven't got an analog signal on your soundbar so what i need to do is start playing that track and then switch the input so the audio will come out of my homepod so if i press space on my keyboard that should start the track playing you can see the tracks playing but you can't hear it yet but if i put it on the av socket so that means the analog connection is going into the av on my tv and now you can hear it coming through [Music] and i can pause it with the keyboard okay so overall really pleased with the results from this i really like the case it's very very simple but the audio quality seems really good so far in the limited test that i've done i haven't tried any high-res audio yet so it'd be interesting to try that maybe with some decent headphones and try that headphone output stage because i haven't tried that as well but yeah i hope this helps thanks very much for watching please like and subscribe you

Channel: leepspvideo

Views: 14,486

Keywords: Pi 3, Hires audio, Raspberry pi, Pi 4, Pi4b, PCM5122 DAC, TI TPA6133A, Headphone amplifier, Amp, Best dac for raspberry pi, High-quality DAC, Audiophile, 24bit, 192khz, Silent case, Heat sink, Fanless

Id: X4NPf0On8j8

Length: 13min 6sec (786 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 30 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/TheDiscoGodfather]

Looks promising.