How to make Topping D10 act as a preamp

[Krunok]

Ok i found the problem. If you unpack the iso file on your disk in your laptop it ask to format disk E H etc. If you do so it can't mount ( so it looks like) If you ignor this question to format (under windows) it works fine.

I'm glad you managed to fix it. Yes, initially you have to have only 1 partition that spans the entire SD card formatted with FAT32.
After that you transfer the image to the SD card using Win32DiskImager. If something goes wrong with the installation you again have to repartition the SD card so it has only 1 partition that spans the intire SD - as you have figured out by yourself.

 

[Snarfie]

I'm glad you managed to fix it. Yes, initially you have to have only 1 partition that spans the entire SD card formatted with FAT32.
After that you transfer the image to the SD card using Win32DiskImager. If something goes wrong with the installation you again have to repartition the SD card so it has only 1 partition that spans the intire SD - as you have figured out by yourself.

We are learning . Would be handy if Volumio made a notice not to format these partions in Windows . By the way connecting your Rapsberry to utp connection made the reaction time on my Mobile Android phone much faster. Did a IP forwarding/reservation on my router concerning Volumio.

 

[Krunok]

Michelangelo Guarise, chief developer of the Volumio, told me yesterday he will support Volumio users of ASR forum personally. He can be contacted at this email address: [email protected]

He is on the vacation until 22nd of August but when he returns I will told him to include your suggestion in the "Get started" section of the Volumio.

 

[Krunok]

We are learning . Would be handy if Volumio made a notice not to format these partions in Windows . By the way connecting your Rapsberry to utp connection made the reaction time on my Mobile Android phone much faster. Did a IP forwarding/reservation on my router concerning Volumio.

Yes, Ethernet connection is preferred for RPI 3 but not for 3 B+ as you can't play HiRes over it so you should use WiFi instead.

Regarding skipping through the track, I can't test it right now as I'm on vaccation but I'm sure you can adjust the volume by positioning the mouse within volume circle and using scroll button so maybe you can do the same on the left circle where you can se the current track playing.

 

[έχω δίκιο]

Yes, Ethernet connection is preferred for RPI 3 but not for 3 B+ as you can't play HiRes over it so you should use WiFi instead.

I'm using a Raspberry Pi 3 with Volumio as my music server. It gets the music from my Thecus 8 x 3TB RAID 6 NAS and streams to my Emotiva Stealth DC-1 DAC that feeds directly into an Adcom GFA-555 amp.

It's very nice and quite a bit faster than I thought it would be, but I am considering upgrading to an Asus Tinker Board Model S. That gets me a much faster CPU, true Gigabit ethernet, a soldered-on 16GB of flash drive, and double the RAM (2GB vs. 1GB). It's a bit more pricey at $85 locally, but it's pretty key to my music listening, so it's not a big cost in the scheme of things.

 

[Krunok]

I'm using a Raspberry Pi 3 with Volumio as my music server. It gets the music from my Thecus 8 x 3TB RAID 6 NAS and streams to my Emotiva Stealth DC-1 DAC that feeds directly into an Adcom GFA-555 amp.

It's very nice and quite a bit faster than I thought it would be, but I am considering upgrading to an Asus Tinker Board Model S. That gets me a much faster CPU, true Gigabit ethernet, a soldered-on 16GB of flash drive, and double the RAM (2GB vs. 1GB). It's a bit more pricey at $85 locally, but it's pretty key to my music listening, so it's not a big cost in the scheme of things.

Frankly, you should do that only if it pleases you, but it will in no way improve the quality of your system, which is already great. What speakers are you using?

 

[έχω δίκιο]

Frankly, you should do that only if it pleases you, but it will in no way improve the quality of your system, which is already great. What speakers are you using?

Thank you. My speakers are VMPS Super Tower/R speakers which I've had for many years. I replaced all of the old woofers and passive radiators have been replaced with new (obtained from Brian Cheney, the engineer/owner of VMPS shortly before he passed away in 2012). See:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/wqdnil3hr5mysa3/VMPS_Super_Tower_R_Brochure_B&W.pdf?dl=0

I re-capped the Adcom GFA-555 a few years back. When I refurb the GFA-555 amps, I also replace the cruddy single-turn bias adjustment pots with high-quality 10 turn Cermet pots. The pots they come with are so touchy that they make the bias miserable to get spot-on.

My reason for the replacement of the pi 3 is primarily speed. I'd like it to be snappier in rendering Volumio web pages, and in dealing with the 6K+ tracks, many of which are high res and lossless. Right now, I'm moving everything over WiFi (to a Ubiquiti 2.4/5GHz enterprise WAP) because of the Raspberry Pi 3's USB-based Ethernet adapter. Too many people have had issues with it and I'm using a USB DAC, not an I2S DAC.

I'm sure you're right that it's not necessary, but I've never thought to myself, "gee, I wish that computer was slower."

 

[Krunok]

These are very fine speakers.

Well, I'm sure your RPI 3 can handle HiRes with ease, but you can enable SSH, login to your Volumio and check processor utilisation with top command to see how it performs when playing some HiRes material, although I'm sure you will find it is well below 50% of utilisation.

Sure, nobody would thought that, but the rule "don't touch it if it works well" always applies.

 

[Krunok]

This is how it looks on my RPI 3 B+ when playing PCM 192/24 album (Best of Yazoo) over WiFi from NAS. As you can see MPD takes only 4% of the CPU.

 

[έχω δίκιο]

First off, thanks for that screen grab. It's an eye-opener.

Well, I'm sure your RPI 3 can handle HiRes with ease, but you can enable SSH, login to your Volumio and check processor utilisation with top command to see how it performs when playing some HiRes material, although I'm sure you will find it is well below 50% of utilisation.

I'm more concerned with moving a lot of data over WiFi. And it's using the single WAP that's shared between many devices (iPads, iPhones, IoT devices, etc.).

Sure, nobody would thought that, but the rule "don't touch it if it works well" always applies.

The beauty is that I can shut the pi 3 down, put the Tinker Board in place, and swap it back out if I run into problems. Since all of the music resides on my NAS, I don't have to move music to effect the swap. I wrote a script (combination Apple Automator and shell script that calls rsync) to keep the music library on the NAS up to date.

I'm posting this from an iMac Pro with an 8 core, 3.2GHz Xeon CPU, 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD that moves data at better than 2.5GB/sec, so it's not like I'm constrained by common sense when it comes to selecting computing power for the task at hand.

 

[Krunok]

First off, thanks for that screen grab. It's an eye-opener.

I'm more concerned with moving a lot of data over WiFi. And it's using the single WAP that's shared between many devices (iPads, iPhones, IoT devices, etc.).

You shouldn't be concerned if you choose your WiFi WAP carefully. I'm using D-Link DIR-885L (https://eu.dlink.com/uk/en/products/dir-885l-ac3150-mumimo-ultra-wifi-router) and my Volumio can normally play music while my kids are watching 4K video with 55Mbps video bandwidth on TV in their room. MU-MIMO technology was invented solely for that reason.

 

[Snarfie]

Does volumio has a DSP room correction addon. Foobar2000 has a roomcorrection addon from Mathaudio QE which works quite good.

 

[Krunok]

Does volumio has a DSP room correction addon. Foobar2000 has a roomcorrection addon from Mathaudio QE which works quite good.

It has. A colleague of mine has ported BruteFIR to Volumio and it works good and is stable. FIR filters can easilly be designed by rePhase writen by @pos. I intend to do a detailed writeup on this forum once I clear the measurement procedure on Volumio with REW which is still not working. I'm getting help from John Mulcahy with that so hopefully it will be finished soon once the bug with timing reference measurement is resolved.

Last version of BruteFIR plugin for Volumio can be found here: https://github.com/balbuze/volumio-plugins/tree/master/plugins/audio_interface/brutefir3

 

[Alesana95]

Sorry to resurrect a dead post, but I just ordered a raspberry pi 4 as well as a D10s. I was looking at preamps to go with it when I came across this thread.

Would the D10s work with this as well? If so is there any benefit in getting a preamp instead of just using the D10s, other than the volume control?

I was hoping to do all my volume control from the pi anyways, so I'm intrigued to try this and just get a power amp but I'm not sure if it would be much less quality than a preamp or integrated amp.

Thanks in advance!