rwanou
Member
Hi All,
I'm soon to invest in an extra HiFi setup for my Corona Home Office, so I'm loosing some time on the forums trying to figure what my next DAC will be. I have a bunch of old Raspberry Pis rotting in the basement, and I thought I could re-use one of them to create an audiophile DAC. I already have 2 RPI with a Justboom AMP hat to power some integrated speakers in my home (1 stereo in the playroom, 1 divided into 2 mono entities for the 2 bathrooms). There is an extra Raspberry Pi zero with the Justboom DAC hat connected to my living room amp. Everything runs on PiCorePlayer, I'm quite happy with the result.
Now, I've been reading on this forum and elsewhere that the RPI 3 USB port is noisy. Apparently this is backed up with tangible measurements. But could someone explain the theory behind this noise? My limited knowledge has me thinking that a signal over USB is purely digital. Meaning that the quality of the transmission matters little as long as the message passes to its destination. The audio file (FLAC, MP3...) consists of bits of data that needs to be passed in whole to the DAC. In case noise interferes with the message, polluted packets should be invalidated and sent again. The result being that the DAC would receive basically the entirety of the source file, and then it should be fully capable of converting it to Analog signal, with its given quality (precision of the clock, quality of the chip etc.). I'm pretty sure the bandwidth of USB is more than enough to absorb any overhead of sending the data twice if signal is really poor.
I have the same question regarding high end expensive audiophile ethernet cables (although I don't want to open the Pandora box). Is it really necessary to invest in a 1000$/m ethernet cable when any cat6 cable can handle 1Gb/s and that TCP/IP protocol guarantees the integrity of the data?
I'd love to read some decent explanation on this matter.
I'm soon to invest in an extra HiFi setup for my Corona Home Office, so I'm loosing some time on the forums trying to figure what my next DAC will be. I have a bunch of old Raspberry Pis rotting in the basement, and I thought I could re-use one of them to create an audiophile DAC. I already have 2 RPI with a Justboom AMP hat to power some integrated speakers in my home (1 stereo in the playroom, 1 divided into 2 mono entities for the 2 bathrooms). There is an extra Raspberry Pi zero with the Justboom DAC hat connected to my living room amp. Everything runs on PiCorePlayer, I'm quite happy with the result.
Now, I've been reading on this forum and elsewhere that the RPI 3 USB port is noisy. Apparently this is backed up with tangible measurements. But could someone explain the theory behind this noise? My limited knowledge has me thinking that a signal over USB is purely digital. Meaning that the quality of the transmission matters little as long as the message passes to its destination. The audio file (FLAC, MP3...) consists of bits of data that needs to be passed in whole to the DAC. In case noise interferes with the message, polluted packets should be invalidated and sent again. The result being that the DAC would receive basically the entirety of the source file, and then it should be fully capable of converting it to Analog signal, with its given quality (precision of the clock, quality of the chip etc.). I'm pretty sure the bandwidth of USB is more than enough to absorb any overhead of sending the data twice if signal is really poor.
I have the same question regarding high end expensive audiophile ethernet cables (although I don't want to open the Pandora box). Is it really necessary to invest in a 1000$/m ethernet cable when any cat6 cable can handle 1Gb/s and that TCP/IP protocol guarantees the integrity of the data?
I'd love to read some decent explanation on this matter.