Raspberry Pi gets its own sound card

http://www.engadget.com/2014/03/11/raspberry-pi-wolfson-audio-card/?

by neya • 12 years ago

48 32 12 years ago

bananas• 12 years ago

I love the fact that a whole ecosystem has appeared around patching up the holes in the Pi's architecture[1]. Unfortunately by the time you've purchased them all, you probably could have bought a BeagleBoard instead.

[1] The built in codec and filtering is absolutely horrible making it pretty useless for audio applications.

beagle3• 12 years ago

I have a beaglebone black, but I can't get it to encode FullHD video in realtime. Am I missing something? or is there actually a justification for both the RasPi and the BeagleBone?

gardarh• 12 years ago

The raspi has a hardware video decoder for some codecs (e.g. H.264) whereas the bbb doesn't. Hence the bbb is not very practical for htpc setup.

throwawayaway4• 12 years ago

usually when people do [1] or something like that it's to a link. to my ear the audio out of the pi's hdmi port is perfectly fine. i think the DAC used in the RCA jack is probably not very good. I would pay for a HDMI audio to DAC adapter rather than $33 for another soundcard that just works with the pi.

nitrogen2• 12 years ago

Are there any sub-$100 HDMI DACs that do 5.1 or 7.1? That would be amazingly useful if so.

jrabone4• 12 years ago

usually when people do [1] or something like that it's to a link

Offtopic, but footnotes predate the web by quite some time. If only we had a easy way of formatting super/subscript...

asb2• 12 years ago

Audio via HDMI is digital so there really are no problems there. The 3.5mm audio jack is just a simple PWM (see plots at http://www.crazy-audio.com/2013/11/quality-of-the-raspberry-...). Sound quality is actually quite improved upon the first release, but it's never going to be great.

the_ancient• 12 years ago

If you using it for HTPC then beagleboard is useless as it has no hardware based video decoding. That is why the Pi is so popular for HTPC's, built in H264 decoding hardware

makomk• 12 years ago

The Beagleboard's probably a bad example in this case, but I've got a Cubieboard with hardware video decode and line-in/line-out that cost me less than the Pi + this board. (I believe it also has SPDIF on one of the pin headers. All of this was essentially free - the SoC it uses has built-in audio DAC/ADC, Ethernet controller, SATA, and a bunch of other neat stuff.) Plus a lot of early Pi purchasers won't be able to use this without buying another Pi, since the original version doesn't expose the I2S interface required by this.

VexXtreme• 12 years ago

Nice. PI's built in audio processing is extremely crappy and the analog 3.5mm output is almost unusable for music.

jablan3• 12 years ago

How can I actually hear this? I am no audiophile, but I can't notice any audio problems with my Pi.

throwawayaway4• 12 years ago

apparently the DAC for the RCA out is 11bit - but I can't really find any definitive proof of that.

jrabone4• 12 years ago

I find quality in-ear headphones extremely revealing of poor quality output. Shure e5c, to pick an older set that I own, are especially unforgiving of noisy output stages and cross-coupled interference. The additional acoustic isolation really helps your brain focus on the audio by cutting out the masking effects of environmental noise. This isn't always a good thing.

For example, the Cowon S9 audio player was supposedly designed for high output quality, with a pile of DSP presets for EQ etc. With the e5c's you can really hear the poor quality processing of the EQ, especially on reverb tails. Have to turn the EQ off completely to eliminate them.

yardie• 12 years ago

I used my Pi as an Airplay receiver connected to our hifi. It was pretty bad. But I have a v1 Pi a lot of corners were cut to get it out and under budget for early adopters.

ctz• 12 years ago

Link: http://uk.farnell.com/wolfson-microelectronics/wolfson-audio...

It's disappointing that this doesn't support v1.0 boards. I hadn't realised that RPis had been fragmented like that.

omh• 12 years ago

It looks like the P5 header that it uses was only added in rev2, and "intended to be a suitable attachment point for ... audio codec boards"[1].

It's definitely a shame that things are fragmented, I was considering adding audio to my old Pi. But at least they're cheap enough to justify buying a second one :-)

[1] http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1929

nitrogen2• 12 years ago

What bus is used to communicate with the sound card? The obvious candidate is USB, but the Pi's USB bandwidth is limited and I don't recall whether USB is available on the pin headers.

miahi• 12 years ago

If it uses the P5 header, then it's I2C - so there are no USB issues. I remember reading about (other?) Wolfson DACs on Raspi and they were using I2C.

asb2• 12 years ago

It's actually I2S primarily. I2C would be used for control (volume etc I suppose)

lxa2• 12 years ago

there is no USB on the pin headers, unfortunately (Schematic: http://www.raspberrypi.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Raspbe...)

DiabloD3• 12 years ago

Raspberry Pi has USB right? So why not just get a Schiit Modi? A very high quality DAC that can be entirely USB powered.

TkTech• 12 years ago

The USB on the Pi has some issues. A lot of devices need to use an external, powered USB hub because the board can't supply enough. Your ethernet is also going through the USB hub.

yetihehe• 12 years ago

The issue with usb on rpi is that it's unstable. It can drop messages. For ethernet it doesn't mean much, because packets will be retransmitted, but for audio it means sound will occasionally stop for a moment. It's very annoing.

pretz• 12 years ago

The Schiit Modi is double the cost of the Wolfson card and has no audio input capabilities. Seems like for uses outside of an HTPC the Wolfson card provides a lot more flexibility.

Raspberry Pi gets its own sound card

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