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

I haven’t had time to mess with it yet but it should work as long as you’re supplying separate power to the pi and hat. I’m not sure how the higher power requirements of the rpi5 itself would fare with the pi2aes supplying power to the pi, the pi4 wanted 5.1v at 3A and the pi5 wants something like 5A and iirc uses the pd ability of the new stock psu in some capacity (unrelated to actual voltage though).

 

We can send you the files so you could get them cut locally.

 

The 5A includes usb, the real need is likely much less. The PI2AES P3.x actually delivers up to 5A. The PI2AES itself uses less than 100ma of that. Also because it delivers this to the PI via the GPIO pins it does not need to be 5.1V. The extra 0.1 V is due the the voltage drop on the USB-C power input.

Note that the PI2AES 2.0 does not have the internal supply. It accepts 5V in, but this is not designed to supply the PI as well. Only the PI2AES.

 

is the new version of pi2aes lite coming soon? any foreseeable issues with pi5 use?

 

With mercury we decided to limit the hats to the PI2AES 2.0 only. We are looking at a new hat in the fall that will include analog (as suggested by a previous poster). Possibly Modular that will have a low cost base version with only coax along with the analog. Then an add on that provides AES, optical and I2S.

All still TBD.

 

Hi Michael. Your website still says "The PI2AES-LITE is Sold Out, new version coming in May!". I take that to mean a new Lite version so you might want to clarify if that version is no more.

 

thanks for the heads up. I went ahead and changed that to tell people to take a look at the 2.0. At this stage because of chip availability issues we are just going to focus on the 2.0 and the mercury V3. At least until the Fall.

 

So, I guess I have to eat my words! We had a batch of PI2AES-LITE boards that need one of those key parts. Turns out I was able find enough extra to release 100 of the boards. So the PI2AES-LITE is now back in stock. Delivery is 1-2 weeks from now, but 1-2 days after that.

 

Good timing. Just ordered one. Thanks!

 

Thanks @Michael Kelly for the quick fulfillment! Just following up on my own post here;

https://www.superbestaudiofriends.o...y-your-pc-or-laptop.8878/page-134#post-427245

The Pi2AES works fine with the latest Rpi OS (Bookworm). All I needed to do was add "dtoverlay=hifiberry-digi-pro" to the /boot/firmware/config.txt and it shows up in the audio device list. Did not have to disable the HDMI audio or mess with Alsa as mentioned in the link in my above post. Was much simpler than I thought it might be. I now have VLC outputting audio and video via HDMI to the home theatre, and Strawberry sending music to the Pi2AES and via coax the the Bifrost2/Jot2.

It may or may not sound as good as using a dedicated music player OS like Moode or Volumio, but being able to do both music and movies on the one device allowed me to retire the rather ancient laptop that was doing media player duties in the living room. All in all super happy with how it worked out.

 

Hello everyone,

PI2AES (v1 hat on RPI4) has no signal from SPDIF output. We can't test other interfaces.

aplay -L
null
Discard all samples (playback) or generate zero samples (capture)
default
hw:CARD=sndrpihifiberry,DEV=0
snd_rpi_hifiberry_digi, HiFiBerry Digi+ Pro HiFi wm8804-spdif-0
Direct hardware device without any conversions
plughw:CARD=sndrpihifiberry,DEV=0
snd_rpi_hifiberry_digi, HiFiBerry Digi+ Pro HiFi wm8804-spdif-0
Hardware device with all software conversions
sysdefault:CARD=sndrpihifiberry
snd_rpi_hifiberry_digi, HiFiBerry Digi+ Pro HiFi wm8804-spdif-0
Default Audio Device
dmix:CARD=sndrpihifiberry,DEV=0
snd_rpi_hifiberry_digi, HiFiBerry Digi+ Pro HiFi wm8804-spdif-0
Direct sample mixing device

/etc/asound.conf
pcm.!default {
type hw card 0
}
ctl.!default {
type hw card 0
}

/etc/os-release
PRETTY_NAME="Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm)"
NAME="Debian GNU/Linux"
VERSION_ID="12"
VERSION="12 (bookworm)"
VERSION_CODENAME=bookworm
ID=debian
HOME_URL="https://www.debian.org/"
SUPPORT_URL="https://www.debian.org/support"
BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugs.debian.org/"

uname -a
Linux pi 6.6.42-v8+ #1787 SMP PREEMPT Thu Jul 25 17:44:41 BST 2024 aarch64 GNU/Linux

Thanks

 

What are you using for a player?

 

I use PI2AES mainly for spotifyd and couple of days before i disconnected PSU from board and HAT (5v mod) for different reasons. After duties, i powered board and hat and got issue with Spotify. Checked daemon logs and it shows playback, but digital input LED (SPDIF) not showing on amplifier and no sound comes from speakers.
We tried many formats on different players (alsa mod) and while PI2AES leds are working correctly when playing different formats (44k, 48k) we have no signal coming from hat.

About months ago, we had similiar issue and we thought we maybe some was data corrupted SD card, we did full reinstall and everything worked fine, but this time i got Solid State Drive on Rasperry and system is working quite well after planned power off.

 

Hmm, that makes me think it might be a hardware issue. Dunno, sorry that is not much help.

 

Are you using the RCA output jack? If so the BNC connector has the same signal and can be used if you have the right cable or an RCA to BNC adapter.

 

Thank you for your response.

It's shame that I forgot that RCA and digital coaxial cables are same, so i had and used, but issue hasn't fixed.

$ aplay Free_Test_Data_2MB_WAV.wav
aplay: main:831: audio open error: Device or resource busy

$ speaker-test -c2
speaker-test 1.2.8

Playback device is default
Stream parameters are 48000Hz, S16_LE, 2 channels
Using 16 octaves of pink noise
Playback open error: -16,Device or resource busy

 

The device busy error tells us that the CPU cannot find the WM 8804 AES transmitter that is on the i2c bus. My best guess is that the board was damaged possibly during handling. I know I've said it before, but it bears repeating again, bypassing the input protection circuit leaves the board very vulnerable to static damage. Send an email to us and I will see about a discount on a replacement, if you still want to have a PI2AES.

 

Hello Michael,
I will try resolve the issue with full software reinstall first.

Thank you

 

We are releasing a new version of Mercury V3 this week. Mercury DAC has the same digital guts, but adds a stereo DAC output. Decent performance at -106dB typical, but very low jitter of course, because it is tapped off the internal I2S bus. Price will be $599 and the digital only version is already reduced to $499. With the pandemic driven price and availability issues behind us, we can now go back to the original pricing we had a few years back. Our costs are still a bit higher than before, but $499 is where we always wanted to be.

We will be releasing the docs and test results by next Monday. Tell all your friends!

 

Just updated the Moode image for Mercury V3 to 9.0.6. Also enabled the WiFi Access Point by default. See our home page for more info.