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

Turns out, we made an internal decision to release this as part of a Kickstarter campaign next month. We kind of have used up all the possible sales here at SBAF! Pretty much anyone who wants one has a PI2AES or a mercury already. which is totally awesome, but a bit of a bummer still.

 

Hi.
Is it possible to use HQPlayer Embedded on Mercury V3 and connect it to DAC Topping D90 via i2s?

 

yes to the dac, but I have not tried to port hqplayer. I am sure it will run but may need some configuration to fully support Mercury. See the HW Reference Manual on the web site for the details of what needs to be done to enable the mercury bring just the basic pi support.

 

And what would be the supported resolution in PCM and in DSD NATIVE using i2s?

 

No dsd, but dsd over pcm is supported. Max is 192khz as this is limited by the pi I2S interface.

 

And via USB, what is the supported resolution in PCM and in DSD NATIVE?
I can use a DDC to convert to i2s to connect to DAC.

 

USB gives you dsd and pcm up to 384khz. The audio quality and actual improvement with dsd and the higher frame rate is likely to be more placebo than actual results.

 

The Pandemic is done and the supply chain has finally normalized. Thus we already announced reduced pricing on Mercury V3 (now including analog DAC). Now we are reducing pricing on the PI2AES 2.0 (was $299, now $199) and the PI2AES-LITE (was $199 now $149). Now you can get some of the best, highest rated network streamers for less!

 

Huzzah!!! (Says the guy who has a Gen 1 Pi2, and will have to have it pried from his cold, dead fingers!)

 

Caution, shameless shill ahead!

But the new version allows you to run off of 5V linear power supply for even lower noise because it doesn't have the onboard switcher! Doesn't it make you want to buy one, or two or maybe a whole set for the family?

Shameless shill complete.

 

First two seconds of reading this, dumbass me was thinking that you were about to release a Streamer named "The Pandemic".

This said price reduction nowadays is so rare that i can only commend you.

 

@Michael Kelly should release a “Pandemic Edition” of the devices! Nothing different (except maybe no AKM chips), just the old price. Nostalgia sells

 

Too late. Sigma 11 @ 5V to both boards.

 

Here is a simple workaround if you'd like to run piCorePlayer 9.20 on a Raspberry Pi 5 with a Pi2AES. The official download of pCP 9.20 didn't work with Pi 5, although the same microSD card works with Pi 4. On a Pi 5 , the pCP was able to boot but were not able to control the Pi2AES, specifically, the LEDs for 44.1k and 48k won't light up and there was no sound output. The latest RoPieee works on Pi 5 and Pi2AES. By comparing both config.txt files and trying different statement lines one by one, I found that by adding a single statement line

dtparam=spi=off

at the end of the piCorePlayer config.txt file the Pi5 would be able to work with the Pi2AES. I am not a linux nor a raspberry guy, thus I don't know why. I assume that this is a bug. Once the driver updated in the future, we may not need this workaround anymore.

 

As promised the jitter and THD plots for Mercury V3 DAC are up.

Power was from a Meanwell 12V supply. A linear may improve this, but that is not something we can test. I mean, we could use our $1K benchtop linear supply, but that's instrumentation grade and not something the average user would have access to.

Some key observations:
Average jitter is 252 psec. which is the same as the SYS-2722 Analyzer
Jitter plot shows very low peaks, though obviously not as good as the SYS-2722 in loopback
Note that the SYS-2722 does not use the same method of jitter plot that the later Audio Precision APx555B does.
Analog out jitter is very clean, but the noise floor is limiting
Analog out THD is good, not great. But the 2nd order dominates so hopefully a bit smoother than some

That's it for now. Questions, comments, kudos, flames, etc are welcome!