Raspberry Pi as an Audio Streamer Guide

hi guys and welcome to my latest video now what we have here today is raspberry pi used as a audio streamer basically digital source digital audio streamer so first i'm going to talk about how to actually turn this piece of general computing board into a audio streamer after that i'll try to quickly explain why would you do that what are the benefits of having this feeding your deck instead of using something else and in last part of the video i'll briefly mention how can you make this into an audio file grade streamer that's actually better than any general purpose pc okay so that said let's start with the first point here and that's a little bit about raspberry pi itself and how to turn it into an audio streamer and i'll start with telling you that when you buy this board it's just like this it's only boards and as you can see here this is the box it's really small that's all there is inside just a naked board no case no cables basically nothing and this board is basically a miniature general purpose computer this piece here is arm cpu the the same one that we find in smartphones for example and just by looking around it you can see a lot of connections micro usb that's for power but important thing to to mention is that you don't get power supply inside of the box you buy it separately for example like this one it's around five bucks or something like that by the way the board itself is 35 40 bucks depending on which version you get but that's really not that important because anything from pi 3 3 b plus and nowadays pi 4 will serve great for our needs as audio streamer so basically 35 40 bucks for this board and then like five to ten bucks for power supply and you're only left to choose case there's a lot of cases that you can buy on the market on amazon ebay aliexpress ranging from plastic ones that cost just few bucks two really nice looking aluminium ones that are maybe 10 or 12 bucks so next to the power supply there is a hdmi port you can attach external screen but you don't need to do that i'll explain later there's a auxiliary 3.5 millimeters output so you can connect this directly to some sort of amplifier or headphones but this is of a really low quality if you're a hifi enthusiast you don't want to use this really and on this side you can see ethernet port and four usb ports now quick mention here that anything older than pi4 the bus between ethernet port and usb ports is shared and supposedly starting from pi 4 these two have separate buses and the jitter and all kind of interference coming from ethernet port is not connected to usb port and that supposedly gives less noisy usb outputs which is good in our case because we use real-time signal for audio streaming that's sensitive to jitter and digital noise but in my case i use this one which is 3b plus and there are also ways to improve its output now the next thing i wanted to touch is that raspberry pi doesn't actually have any storage memory it does have operational ram and depending on the version that can be like two gigs four gigs eight gigs i'm not really sure about all the versions but important thing for our needs any ram configuration will do just fine for audio streaming but where do you store your files and install operating system you ask well you do that on an sd card actually microsd as you can see here mine is already inside and the whole operating system is basically located on this sd card now that's another topic that i'll just briefly mention here but it deserves more space probably that we don't have in this video so you can install basically any operating system that's meant to be run on raspberry pi and its architecture but we need something that is like stripped down version of operating system dedicated for audio use for audio streaming and for that you can choose between several different os's for example one of the most popular and well-known is volumio and this one is really feature-rich it has really nice looking ui and it has everything that you need for using raspberry pi as streamer because it can connect to spotify tidal and so on internet radios it can also read local files from usb flash drive or external hard drive or network storage basically anything you hook to your raspberry pi volumio can read and it can make it into a really multi multi-functional digital streamer same goes for example for mood it's another alternative that's again very feature packed it also has really nice ui and these operating systems are basically like a really they're centered around music player playlists and connecting to streaming services and local storages now there are other alternatives some more bare bone operating systems like uh rope i accel that i'm using they they basically act as a bridge or as an end point but we don't need to get into those details right away if you're a beginner in a raspberry pi world the good place to start is something like volumio or mood because they're feature rich they're basically all you need to start and get into this and really important thing to mention here is that all of these are free so you can just go to official volumio moods raw pie excel page you just download operating system image put it on your pc then put it on sd card by using any of the softwares capable of creating bootable drives from images and for example one of these is called etcher something i'll put it on on the screen it's again free it's really easy really automated process you just choose the image you downloaded you choose sd card on which you want to place that image and here you are you have fully functional operating system on your card then you put it inside of your pi you connect it and power it on and first time you boot your operating system you need to wait for a few minutes maybe but every other time it's much faster but the interesting thing is that raspberry pi uses so little power when it's in idle mode or just streaming music it's in range of just few watts maybe two watts or three watts and you actually don't need to turn it off so the next thing that you might be wondering is how do you actually control a device without any input or any screen and as i mentioned you can actually attach screen to it there is hdmi port here you can also attach keyboard and mouse and make it act as a small computer but you don't need to do this that's the beauty of this thing because the moment you attach it to your home network this little guy is open for any device on the network so you can access to it just by using it ip address and for most operating system there's a name how to open it for example like uh something like home.volumio and when you enter that in any web browser on any pc or smartphone inside of your home network the ui of raspberry pi and the system you installed on it will open so you can control it from anywhere in the house with any of your other connected devices but there's also another option you don't even have to use integrated ui that comes with operating system because there are a lot of dedicated smartphone apps for that purpose and for example i'll quickly show you i'm using a m connect there are others too and when you open it it always has its own interface no matter what kind of operating system you're using on raspberry pi itself for example i can go to browser here and into my local storage and browse files but also i can connect to my streaming services like tidal or cobas that i'm currently using so let's load title for example and here you go all of the albums all of your favorites you can browse them play them and so on this app connects to raspberry pi all of ui is here and it's always the same no matter the operating system so basically your controls your ui and the look of all of that is not dependent on the operating system you use here that's how i use it personally and the last thing in this part of the video that i wanted to mention is when you actually connect your dac to usb output here on raspberry pi you don't need any drivers because this uh all of the operating systems are based on linux and they support usb 2.0 class audio devices and basically all decks that i ever tried were automatically recognized by the system okay and with that we finished the first part of the video for the second part i promised i would answer why would you do that well see some of you that maybe are using headgear and it's sitting right next to your pc you don't need this kind of device you really don't maybe your gear hi-fi gear is very close to your pc it comes natural that you connect it directly you operate it directly from your pc but for many users myself included for example you're using speaker setup in your living room and your pc is not next to that setup maybe it's on in the other corner of the room and maybe you would need like 10 meters of usb cables or interconnect cables and that's messy and not neat really and it can also degrade sound quality but i'll not get into that right now this acts like a bridge it's really small you place it close to your deck it takes all of the streaming and all of the files anywhere from your home and from your network and you just let them pass through to your deck and you can control all that sitting in your couch with your smartphone now some of you might be asking well why wouldn't i go about that convenience using bluetooth because more and more decks in the market have bluetooth connectivity and every phone already have bluetooth connectivity why would i use any streamer over bluetooth and i know many of you already shrugged your shoulders at the mention of bluetooth well because simply bluetooth is a lossy type of connection and since i don't really have editors and time for fancy animations and graphics on this channel i made a quick sketch to actually demonstrate why not because if you're using bluetooth what you're basically doing i'll demonstrate this with streaming for example let's say you're using cobaz that has lossless audio files in a really high quality and if you're using bluetooth what you're basically doing is streaming that high quality files to your phone then your phone is compressing them into a lossy format that's suitable for really narrow bandwidth low bandwidth of bluetooth connection and sending some lossy files that are similar qualities to like highly compressed mp3 or something like that to your deck and in case of using raspberry as digital streamer what's actually happening is that you're streaming files maybe from some streaming service or even external hard drive or network storage to your raspberry pi like full information lossless and then raspberry pi is sending them directly to your deck again unaltered with full lossless quality and your phone in this case is just acting as a remote the signal never goes through your phone but your phone is a wi-fi remote control with ui with playlists and everything but the path which signal takes goes from the storage or streaming service to raspberry pi to your deck through wires and in full quality another reason actually is uh also convenience because in this case your phone only uses wi-fi to be a remote in this case your phone uses wi-fi to receive files but it also uses bluetooth to send files and that drains battery much faster so basically uh having a decent digital streamer is better in both quality and convenience and some other benefits of this type of streamer over for example httpc that you could put that you could put in your hi-fi rack this is so small and consumes so little power that it doesn't need any active fans that means it's really silent and that's always good for critical music listening other than that because it really requires low power for example i think it's 2 amperes yeah that's right this is 5 volts 2 amperes power supply which basically means that upgrading this with a low noise power supply better quality power supply that increases its audio quality but i will not talk about this today is much cheaper than powering your hd pc with clean power because it consumes hundreds of watts and low noise power supply of depth with that amount of power is really expensive but with this one you have really decent small linear power supplies of or just low noise switching supplies like if i power for 50 bucks already now for the third and last part of this video i'm going to talk about add-ons that you can add to this board and in raspberry pi world these are called hats as you can see these connections here those are standardized pins and these screws here these four ones are also standardized and that means a lot of manufacturers third party manufacturers can produce add-ons for this board and that gives you some really really nice options for example there are whole decks d a converters in form of boards you just add them here on top and you get additional rca connection connection there and basically it becomes streamer slash deck now i can't go into all of the possible options that you have with with these hats but the one that i'm using for example is called aloe diggy one and this is actually an audiophile grade spdif interface and you connect these two really simply okay i did it quickly so i don't spend too much of your time and you can see now how neatly these two sit on top of each other and depending on the hat and the add-on it can be taller it can be wider and basically if you decide to use one of these hats one of these add-ons you also use appropriate case for that formation for example for this one i'm using this acrylic case that's just suitable for both of these boards okay so now i actually took some time to reassemble the this whole arrangement to the way i'm actually using it from day to day so as you can see now i have digital streamer with usb outputs of course but also with spdif bnc and coaxial output that do provide cleaner and better sounding signal than these usb if you use them alone but it's it's not the focus of this video and if there is enough interest i can also cover the allody1 board and talk a little bit about sound quality and differences compared to just using usb straight out of the main board i simply didn't have any other case i i can put it in because i am using this one with this sort of hat but the point is it doesn't matter if you want to make it more audiophile-centric streamer with some higher quality add-ons or do you want to use just raspberry pi and its own usb outputs in a smaller case than this one the whole price should be somewhere around 50 to 60 bucks and you get a fully capable audio streamer for 50 to 60 bucks and it works as a bridge from any device on your home network to your deck and you're not losing any quality like with bluetooth but you do have the convenience of remote control but if you want to go further than that and make it like a really high quality audiophile streamer you can then start thinking about some of these add-ons but they're not that cheap for example just this aloe dg1 board is 99 bucks and you're like wow but that's more expensive than the whole raspberry pi itself yeah it is and this whole thing costs around 150 but when you actually start using it and when you critically compare itself its sound quality to streamers in the market basically no streamer up to 150 cannot compare with it in terms of sound quality at least i haven't heard one so if you want to buy already finished products with a nice case and factory supplied software bundled we are talking about something like blue sound streamers that cost like quite a bit more of course they do look nicer you don't have to move a finger they you just buy them and you start using them while this one is like do it yourself effort but no matter do you want like a bare bone raspberry pie or raspberry pie enhanced with some hats it will always provide you with greater bang for the buck than any of branded streamers on the market and i really hope i haven't missed anything important because it's a really wide topic with a lot of things to cover and if you are interested i can do more videos for example about operating systems and compare their features and their sound signatures or we can talk about i'll i'll probably do the video about uh alodigi one board itself and actually go into more details about its sound compared to using usbs so tell me what you think in the comments down below and if you would like me to talk a little bit more about other aspects of using raspberry pi as a digital streamer that would be all for today guys now if you like this video then click like subscribe share it with your friends so the channel can expand and grow and bring even more great reviews

Channel: iiWi Reviews

Views: 53,571

Rating: 4.8949342 out of 5

Keywords: Raspberry, Pi, Streamer, streaming, audio, bridge, tutorial, guide, how to, know how, audiophile, hifi, stereo, digital, DAC, iiwi, iiwireviews

Id: EmFp6c5_VGE

Length: 23min 53sec (1433 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 28 2020