Jump to content
IGNORED

Raspberry Pi serving USB DAC - how to stream Audirvana and Roon


Recommended Posts

I am somewhat overwhelmed with the technicalities and was wondering if the more experienced and knowledgeable users could help me out.

 

  • All my music (FLACs up to 192kHz, and DSD up to DSD128) is stored on the internal hard disk of an iMac.
  • I have a Qobuz Sublime subscription. I do not care about Tidal. 
  • On iMac I run Audirvana (i stream Qobuz from within Audirvana), and also have Roon installed for navigating my 1500 local albums (Roon does not support Qobuz streaming).
  • iMac is connected with an USB cable to a USB DAC (Oppo HA1). 

 

Reading gazillions of posts saying that a general-purpose computer (e.g. my Imac) should be avoided for serving the music directly to a USB DAC because of electromagnetic noise, 'dirty' power, hundreds of CPU threads running at the same time and whatnot, I started suffering from Audiophilia neurosa :) I wanted to insert a dedicated streaming device into my chain to separate the CPU-heavy workload of the iMac from serving the music to the USB DAC. 

 

I bought a Raspberry Pi 3 which is connected via Ethernet cable to the router. Instead of iMac being connected directly to USB DAC, the USB cable is now connecting Raspberry Pi (RPi for short) and USB DAC. So anything that iMac 'sends out' now goes via router and Ethernet cable to RPi which feeds the UBS DAC. 

 

The RPi that I have is the basic barebone version, I do not need any additional electronics (e.g. HifiBerry Dac) to convert it into a DAC or Amp, since I already have a dedicated DAC/Amp. 

 

On RPi I installed RoPieee software which is a RoonBridge software that enables RPi to be recognized as a Roon endpoint.  So far so good, Roon on the iMac sees the USB DAC connected to Ropieee-RPi as an output device, and streaming of my locally stored music runs smoothly and the Roon signal path indicates 'lossless' .

 

However, if i quit Roon on the iMac and start Audirvana, e.g. to play Qobuz, Audirvana (version 3.2.5) does not see RPi as a device.

 

Since I would prefer to stick with RPi as streamer and do not want to invest in microrendu, ultrarendu etc.:

 

  1. Is there any RPi software that I should install instead of Ropieee that will enable RoonBridge but also allow the RPi to be recognized by Audirvana? Of course, it would be either Roon or Audirvana running on IMac, not both at the same time.
  2. If there is no such software to serve both, is there at least a RPi software that will enable Audirvana on iMac to see RPi as a device? In this case I would of course lose the Roon functionality.

 

I would appreciate your critical thoughts whether my newbie logic above makes sense at all.

 

Link to comment

If you can't see the RPi then you don't have both Audirvana set up as a server and the RPi set up as a dlna renderer. 

 

Not sure why you would need both Audirvana and Roon, though. Stick with one or the other, imo.

(1) holo audio red (hqp naa) > chord dave > luxman cl-38uc/mq-88uc > kef reference 1
(2) simaudio moon mind 2 > chord qutest > luxman sq-n150 > monitor audio gold gx100
Link to comment

@yacob RoPieee does not support DLNA so it isn't going to work with A+.

 

Pareto Audio AMD 7700 Server --> Berkeley Alpha USB --> Jeff Rowland Aeris --> Jeff Rowland 625 S2 --> Focal Utopia 3 Diablos with 2 x Focal Electra SW 1000 BE subs

 

i7-6700K/Windows 10  --> EVGA Nu Audio Card --> Focal CMS50's 

Link to comment
3 hours ago, eclectic said:

Use Dietpi. It has a dlna renderer and RoonBridge and can also work with Spotify Connect.

dietpi.com

 

 

Success! Thank you, @eclectic, for pointing me in the direction of DietPi. 

 

I replaced Ropieee with DietPi, installed 2 pieces of optional software (RoonBridge and Gmediarender), in dietpi-config menu i went into audio options and  changed the soundcard to "usb-dac"... and I was good to go!

 

Both Roon and Audirvana can now see Raspberry Pi with the attached USB DAC.

 

3 hours ago, jcn3 said:

Not sure why you would need both Audirvana and Roon, though. Stick with one or the other, imo.

 

Agreed, i would love to use only Roon! However, I am using Qobuz for music discovery and as long Qobuz does not want to work with Roon in allowing their catalog to be included in Roon, I continue streaming Qobuz via Audirvana.  

Link to comment

So, I followed up on these suggestions and was able to use  a raspberry pi  running diet pi as an endpoint for audirvana. Only problem is SQ is just unpleasant. Tinny, more  background noise than I'm used to and  maybe a little bit of distortion.

 

Any suggestions? I have music files on a remote drive, Audivana is on an iMac on the network, the raspberry pi is connected by wireless and feeds usb into a gen5 bimby to a valhalla 2 to HD650s. 

 

Is it likely that the Bimby isn't cleaning up noisy usb? I though gen 5 were supposed to solve that problem and that I wouldn't need a hifiberrydigi.

 

Ive also heard complaints about running the raspberry pi on wireless. There is no direct ethernet connection to the network close by, but  Im wondering if using an apple express in client mode connected by ethernet to raspberry pi might help. (Thats how I connected a micro rendu before I moved it to another system.)

Link to comment

eclectic - I have RoonBridge on dietpi running on RPi3. I would love to use Spotify Connect also. Is it possible to have Roon and Spotify Connect running (available to use) at the same time? Or do you need to shut one down somehow to use the other?

Link to comment

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now



×
×
  • Create New...