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

see the status on our web site.

 

see the status on our web site - things change!

 

Still an excellent value at the new price. Thanks for keeping this going, I may need a 3rd one in the future.

 

Speaking of "things change"... There was some discussion a while ago around configurable I2S pinouts, and at some point you had an RJ45 I2S rider board, which I got for one of my Pi2AES units. Any chance that more configurable I2S would be available at some point?

 

We are changing the I2S over HDMI to the PS Audio pinout for PI2AES Rev. P4.

Parallel is still there and can be used to wire up an RJ45 adapter. It really wasn't worth making a board and keeping it in stock. Demand for I2S via RJ45 was just to small.

 

What do you mean production had stopped.. I ordered mine like a month ago, will I ever get it?

 

Absolutely. I am getting the first 60 next week and will get all the orders out over the course of the next few following weeks. And no, it is not cancelled as I stated previously in this thread!

 

Installed the Raspberry Pi display onto my Pi2AES yesterday. Volumio's add-in display and interface is truly awful. Ugly, unresponsive, pointless.

I've switched to Ropieee which is vastly better, but only works with Roon as a source. It can play UPNP, Airplay etc, but the display only updates with Roon content.

Any other good options?

 

I thought the current pinout was PS Audio. What's the difference? The W1 jumpers are enabled by default?

 

The Pinout is for the gustard. Not sure what you are asking regarding the jumpers.

 

OK thanks! I'm just trying to ascertain what the difference is. As far as I can tell, the changes in going from Gustard to PS Audio spec are that:
- phase of pins 1/3 and 7/9 will be inverted
- pin 15 and 16 will carry SCL and SDA

By W1 I was referring to the header pins on the current PI2AES which allow pins 15, 16 and 18 to carry SCL, SDA and +5V. By default they are unconnected. So as far as I can tell the main change (apart from the phases) would be that pins 15 and 16 are connected by default. Is that correct?

 

None of the pins will be jumpered by default with the new version. But we are changing the header to be 0.1" (2.54mm) instead of 2mm to make it easy for folks to add as needed.

 

Oh, I see, thanks, so it's mainly about the phases. From what I understand inverting the phase of pins 1/3 will invert the absolute polarity and inverting 7/9 will swap left and right channels.

 

When I had a stand-alone Pi2AES system (USB SSD with music plugged into Pi USB ports), moOde was the only distribution that was (barely) acceptable to control from the Pi display. For a while PiCorePlayer was even better, but tricky to configure for standalone use, and eventually it stopped working in that configuration. TBH, Volumio has a bloated, obnoxious music player distribution for a long time, and one of the main reasons, the other being the vagaries of DLNA, that moved me to Roon 5 years ago.

 

you can try ropieeXL it will work with Spotify, apple etc

 

While RopieeeXL supports audio from those services, it doesn't provide any display functionality for those services.

 

Does the PI2AES support 352.8/384kHz over I2S? When I try to play 352.8kHz, the 48/96/192 kHz LED is lit and the DAC detects it as 192kHz. Not sure if this is a software or a hardware issue.

 

No. See this explanation by @Michael Kelly

 

Something surprised me about Ropieee & the 7" display for Pi2AES...

It's intuitive to touch the screen on the pi and control playback on the pi's attached Pi2AES playing the music.

However, it seems that the Ropieee setup actually has these two parts quite isolated. Ropieee plays from the Roon server, and the touchscreen talks to the server. It's just as easy to control a completely different Roon playback device using the touchscreen, and there's no great benefit from having the display and Pi2AES on the same device. There could be drawbacks if the display or supporting software hinders playback in some way.

It also means if anyone wants a really nice Roon control device, a pi + 7" display + ropieee is a great option. It's possible, but not required, to have that device do audio playback as well.

 

Hi Micheal any update on shipping the last batch?