RPI 4B streamer + Topping E30 or Allo Boss 2 player

[SanVJ]

Check here

Digital Signal Processors (DSP)

I'm looking for Boss 2 Dac alone with metal case. It's not available there.

 

[MNX]

I'm looking for Boss 2 Dac alone with metal case. It's not available there.

Try to contact Allo directly.

 

[jmascreen]

Theoretically any allo hat should work. I will try this one day.

Did you get a chance to check this

 

[mbhangui]

Did you get a chance to check this

Sorry. Had totally forgotten about that. WIll try it this week.

 

[ajuvignesh]

I actually ordered the acrylic player 2gb and was sent 4gb, I guess as it's the most popular variant. That was in December though after destroying my boss 1.2.

So, did you find any sonic difference between boss 1.2 and boss 2?
Can you please do a short comparison review?

 

[ajuvignesh]

We'll I've not listened to the boss2 much at home, but the mids and highs are a lot cleaner, the bass is slightly less but more controlled and articulate. Imaging and sound stage are improved probably more to do with the lower noise floor and better psu Once I get a headphone amp built I'll get a better idea.

Whilst I news happy with the 1.2 there is a definite improvement with the boss2, I only upgraded as my cats had damaged the 1.2 otherwise I wouldn't have bought the boss2, even now I wouldn't go for the upgrade to be honest.

Thanks Stefan. I currently own the 1.2 and I absolutely love it except for the highs where my system pronounces it a bit more than what I am comfortable with. Was wondering if Boss 2 sounds warmer compared to Boss 1.2.

 

[ajuvignesh]

Not warmer at all, more clinical and accurate especially the highs and bass.

Thanks again Stefan.

 

[premoddev]

Its all depends on player as well. All mpd based players like Volumio, Moode etc sounds like clinical as mentioned. But if you can use squeezlite like piCoreplayer, all those tones get change.. it will become more warmer and musical.. If you are on a 4GB model of Pi, you can install both LMS and Squeezlite player on same Pi box. Have a try and see how it goes..

cheers..

 

[ajuvignesh]

Its all depends on player as well. All mpd based players like Volumio, Moode etc sounds like clinical as mentioned. But if you can use squeezlite like piCoreplayer, all those tones get change.. it will become more warmer and musical.. If you are on a 4GB model of Pi, you can install both LMS and Squeezlite player on same Pi box. Have a try and see how it goes..

cheers..

Thanks a lot, prem. I am using Moode as of now. I will take your advise and experiment with piCoreplayer.

 

[premoddev]

I tried to install those a couple of years ago, didn't really understand how to (maybe i didn't have the patience, as I don't really like using Linux) maybe I'll revisit that soon, moode is nice but the library management sucks, Tim Curtis the author also recognises that and would prefer someone else to get on board with sorting that out.

I have picoreplayer and Moode on different SD cards. The rest of the chain decides on what to use. I have a NAD c 320 and Yamaha ax496 amps, connected to the same qa3020i speakers. I prefer picoreplayer with Yamaha and Moode with NAD amplifiers.

I never faced any issues dealing with library management on Moode, may be I don't have too big local music files.

 

[jmascreen]

Did anyone tried with realtime kernel with any of the audio OS?

 

[ajuvignesh]

Thanks a lot, prem. I am using Moode as of now. I will take your advise and experiment with piCoreplayer.

Tried installing and setup picoreplayer. I couldn install it and run picoreplayer but couldn’t manage to play a song. Can picoreplayer work without LMS?

 

[premoddev]

Tried installing and setup picoreplayer. I couldn install it and run picoreplayer but couldn’t manage to play a song. Can picoreplayer work without LMS?

Please follow the below link and install LMS on same Pi ..

Install LMS | piCorePlayer documentation

docs.picoreplayer.org

 

[mbhangui]

Please follow the below link and install LMS on same Pi ..

Install LMS | piCorePlayer documentation

docs.picoreplayer.org

I will install LMS directly on my usbridge and RPI4 without using any distribution. What are the lms clients (non web based) available?

 

[premoddev]

I will install LMS directly on my usbridge and RPI4 without using any distribution. What are the lms clients (non web based) available?

I haven't tried it directly on linux, but it can be downloaded from slimdevices.com. A quick google search resulted below link..

Logitech Media Server on Ubuntu 20.04

I posted this thread already to askubuntu.com but maybe it is of interest here too. I upgraded to Ubuntu 20.04 and that broke my installation but I figured out how to make it work again: After some tempering around, I considered to do a fresh install. So I deleted the old stuff in...

ubuntuforums.org

Edit: client is squeezelite player..

 

[mbhangui]

I haven't tried it directly on linux, but it can be downloaded from slimdevices.com. A quick google search resulted below link..

Logitech Media Server on Ubuntu 20.04

I posted this thread already to askubuntu.com but maybe it is of interest here too. I upgraded to Ubuntu 20.04 and that broke my installation but I figured out how to make it work again: After some tempering around, I considered to do a fresh install. So I deleted the old stuff in...

ubuntuforums.org

Edit: client is squeezelite player..

Yes. squeezelite player. That's what I was looking for. Just did a google and got this other players such as SoftSqueeze and SqueezePlay. Or e.g. the iPeng App on your iPhone. I will avoid SoftSqueeze as it is in Java and hence it will suck the memory out of the hardware. squeezelite is written in C, so that should be good.

 

[mbhangui]

I haven't tried it directly on linux, but it can be downloaded from slimdevices.com. A quick google search resulted below link..

Logitech Media Server on Ubuntu 20.04

I posted this thread already to askubuntu.com but maybe it is of interest here too. I upgraded to Ubuntu 20.04 and that broke my installation but I figured out how to make it work again: After some tempering around, I considered to do a fresh install. So I deleted the old stuff in...

ubuntuforums.org

Edit: client is squeezelite player..

Ok. It looks like it is quite simple.

wget https://downloads.slimdevices.com/LogitechMediaServer_v8.1.1/logitechmediaserver_8.1.1_arm.deb
sudo apt-get --fix-broken install libio-socket-ssl-perl
sudo dpkg -i logitechmediaserver_8.1.1_arm.deb
sudo apt-get install -y libsox-fmt-all libflac-dev libfaad2

Got the instructions here

Logitech Media Server with Raspberry Pi 3B+ and 3.2″ TFT Display

The Logitech Media Server, formerly also called Squeezebox Server, is the heart of the Squeezebox ecosystem. In this tutorial I describe the installation on a Raspberry 3B+ including a small display.

www.haraldkreuzer.net

Will try this tomorrow.

 

[jmascreen]

Ok. It looks like it is quite simple.



Got the instructions here

Logitech Media Server with Raspberry Pi 3B+ and 3.2″ TFT Display

The Logitech Media Server, formerly also called Squeezebox Server, is the heart of the Squeezebox ecosystem. In this tutorial I describe the installation on a Raspberry 3B+ including a small display.

www.haraldkreuzer.net

Will try this tomorrow.

Have you tried real time kernel?

 

[ajuvignesh]

Please follow the below link and install LMS on same Pi ..

Install LMS | piCorePlayer documentation

docs.picoreplayer.org

Thank you . Will try and update.

 

[mbhangui]

Have you tried real time kernel?

Yes. Two years back on my main laptop which runs fedora using the CCMRA Repository using kernel-rt. But after my hard disk crashed, I went back to the official kernel. Now there is also Fedora Jam Repo which I believe gives RT kernel.

Configure Fedora to practice and compose music - Fedora Magazine

A pratical howto guide for configuring Fedora Workstation to be used as a music composition and practice studio, with amps and effects.

fedoramagazine.org

The main reason I avoid dietpi, volumio, moode, etc is all of them install too many things to just give the user a web interface. Web interface means installing a http server and whole lot of things (MySQL server, this server that server) and all of them bit by bit take eat a bit of the CPU and memory. It is best to have just the OS on the raspberry PI and use android / IOS / Linux / Mac OS native clients that run on individual laptops to play music rather than use the Raspberry PI's computing power to play the music.

On my raspberry PI, I do something simpler. I just run the mpd daemon with realtime priority using the chrt command in /lib/systemd/system/mpd.service and also dedicate two cpu cores for mpd. Below is my systemd service for mpd which does that

[Service]
Type=notify
EnvironmentFile=/etc/default/mpd
#ExecStart=/usr/bin/chrt 99 /usr/bin/mpd --no-daemon $MPDCONF
ExecStart=/usr/bin/taskset -c 2,3 /usr/bin/mpd --no-daemon $MPDCONF

# Enable this setting to ask systemd to watch over MPD, see
# systemd.service(5). This is disabled by default because it causes
# periodic wakeups which are unnecessary if MPD is not playing.
#WatchdogSec=120

# allow MPD to use real-time priority 40
LimitRTPRIO=40
LimitRTTIME=infinity

# for io_uring
LimitMEMLOCK=64M

# disallow writing to /usr, /bin, /sbin, ...
ProtectSystem=yes

# more paranoid security settings
NoNewPrivileges=yes
ProtectKernelTunables=yes
ProtectControlGroups=yes
ProtectKernelModules=yes
# AF_NETLINK is required by libsmbclient, or it will exit() .. *sigh*
RestrictAddressFamilies=AF_INET AF_INET6 AF_UNIX AF_NETLINK
RestrictNamespaces=yes

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
Also=mpd.socket