Dummies Guide to Pi2AES! Throw away your PC or laptop.

For those tempted in Canada, this is good timing: RPi 4B 4Gb is now back in stock at buyapi.ca: $76.95.

 

Not sure what happened. But I setup my pi2aes and it played ~30 seconds of the first song I played then stopped making noise. I figured it might be a streaming issue, but I plugged in a USB stick and played a local file through Volumio and there's still no sound.

Using Modi Multibit 2. Selected Allo Digi One from list. Volumio works outputting out of the Pi usb into my modi mulitbit 2.

Nevermind, I figured it out.

 

So what was it? Just in case there’s others out there scratching their heads over some weird behavior. Plus, if it’s really dumb we can all make fun of you.

 

A different issue but I thought I'd mention an experience I had last week. After 2 years of flawless operation from my Pi2AES, the SPDIF outputs suddenly stopped working. I run RoPieee and hadn't touched its configuration for a long time. Roon thought everything was working and the amber/red LED on the board showed the correct data rate matching the play stream, but nothing was coming out of the SPDIF ports.

I cycled the power multiple times, checked cabling and verified my DAC inputs worked. Every part of the chain seemed to work correctly except the SPDIF output, and I figured the hardware must have given out. I was about to post here asking for advice when I thought I'd try running Volumio and DietPi, which I had on SD cards. They both worked! I reflashed RoPieee and everything was working again.

 

That’s very interesting, especially since ropiee is supposed to be highly resistant to SD card corruption. It runs out of memory, and only touches the SD card to load or if you change configurations.

 

Sorry for being dense, but I can't work out which pins I should place the jumper on for Gustard format I2S, can anyone help?

 

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?!

 

maybe because the question has been asked/answered in this thread previously (probably multiple/multiple times). Just use the search function at the top of the page, enter gustard, and then check the search this thread only button. I found your answer in less than 30 seconds... but you need to learn how to navigate the site yourself...

 

Thank you.

 

this will def get you our help, much, much quicker.

 

No-one rattled your cage. STFU.

 

George, put the bottle down. You don’t need that, we need each other.

 

Wow feeding the Modius E an AES signal from the Pi2aes really got it slapping. It's a very apparent change. Way more than Modi Multibit with coaxial.

 

I have changed standard PSU (Maxwell) to Allo Shanti LPS and want to admit, audio quality has not increased to justify 220 $ cost (Shanti LPS + Shipping)

Slight increase in imaging and soundstage (5-10%) and maybe psichological (No measurements, just subjective opinion)

I'm Using Denon PMA800NE AMP DAC (PCM5141 chipset) with optical I/O's
I will move to quality DAC later or so and will update the information about 5V LPS improvements for Pi2AES Pro v1

 

The PCM5xxx series had limited resolution (typical thd+n) under -100dB. This will greatly limit any benefit you might hear from a change of psu. As you discovered. Keep us posted as you try a new dac.

 

Set up my Pi2AES-Lite with an Rpi 4 last night. Was super easy. Connected to my Gungnir MB with BNC to BNC. Got MoOde set up playing files off my NAS. Don't really care for the UI and may try a different OS shortly, but it sounds great in any case. Between my new Urd for spinning discs and now the Pi2AES to play FLAC files, I'm in love with my 2 channel system again. The weather is even cooperating, giving me some cool enough nights to listen.

It does appear that the Lite model has no LEDs on the board? Still working my way through the 129 pages of posts here, but lots of useful info so far. Thanks Michael and SBAF!

 

Any ideas on blocking the LED lights on the pi2aes? My rooms looking like a disco.

 

Black tape.
There is no software solution

 

Update on PI2AES 2.0 production. Current stock is down to 5 units. I have another 150 coming sometime in September, actual date TBD. So even if are out of stock for a bit, it will likely just be a few weeks at most. Thanks as always for the great members, contributors and moderators here at SBAF.

 

What's the easiest / best way to have pi2aes and Volumio read files off of a computer that's on the same network? I'm using Foobar UPnP, which means I need to keep Foobar open. I'm guessing there's an easier way to have Volumio see the files on my network?