Pi2 Design Idiot-Proof Ready-To-Go RPi/AES Streamer

@e.schell :

So - yep, what @fraggler said:

 

You guys are amazing! Very much appreciated as always!

 

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!

 

I have a Mercury SBAF rev P8. Maybe there is a way to separate the power of CM4 and the rest? I see some connection P13 - EXPANSION POWER CONNECTOR. I wonder who it is for? I ask because in the case of PI2AES Pro, connecting the power PI and HAT separately definitely felt an improvement.

 

No t really without some board surgery. Sorry.

 

Starting now, we are shipping mercury V3 with the built-in analog DAC. We have changed the name to mercury V3 DAC to reflect this. The documents are up on the website and we will be posting some test results over the next few days, so people can get an idea of quality of the analog output.

This is an added value function, the price stays the same at $499. We are realize that not everybody wants a DAC added to their digital streamer, but it gives you lots of options for your set up. The ability to drive a more sophisticated DAC via the digital outputs while at the same time, connecting a small set of powered speakers or headphone amp, etc. gives the ultimate flexibility to how you consume your music.

 

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!

 

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!