I’ve had a Volumio music player for a while: pretty good overall, but sometimes a bit prone to corrupt filesystems. Checking the website, there was a new version, so I thought I’d try it. It was….interesting. Cleverly done, with squashfs filesystem images and a data partition to save data, but using it gave me a few issues. First of all, the original Raspberry Pi model B I was using turned out to be too slow: the initial setup took 20 min to complete, and playing audio was glitchy as it couldn’t shift data down the USB fast enough. Changing to a Raspberry Pi2 fixed that, but then it dropped off the network. With no HDMI monitor nearby, this was impossible to troubleshoot, so I tried an alternative: I had a HP thin client lying about, and Volumio has a x86 experimental version, so with a CF-IDE converter and a CF card to replace the tiny flash disk in the HP, off I went. Working out a few bugs in the BIOS that make booting the CF and not trying to boot the external USB drives that just contain music took a while, but it worked, quite well, with 2 problems- firstly, the web interface and the view through Cantata didn’t agree, and secondly…
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Regular readers will know that I’ve got some prejudices about audio: for years I didn’t have an MP3 player, eventually relenting, although I still don’t do actual MP3s, and buy music almost exclusively on CD, though it has to be said, my views on downloadable music 10 years ago are starting to be disproved: MP3 at a highish bitrate (which is more practical with increasing bandwidth and storage) is good enough for most people, on most systems, at most times, and lossless formats are becoming more common, especially since Fruitco introduced their lossless format (though of course, they should have introduced it as an open format…).

One thing* has kept me away from using a computer to play music in the house: the analogue outputs of most consumer PCs (and I’m including Fruitco in this) hardware is a bit ropey- but then again, it was never intended for high-quality audio.

Enter the DACMagic. It’s a proper (though very small) hifi component with TOSLink, S/P DIF and USB inputs, and it’ll do the high sample rates that may not be neccesary, but more importantly, it’s a decent DAC chip with the compromise pushed a bit towards quality, and some initial testing sounds as good as the CD with a FLAC file (and, pleasingly, the device was recognised and working within seconds on Ubuntu).

The plan now is a Raspberry Pi and Volumino: the Pi’s analogue audio output is particularly compromised (hardly surprising given it’s a £35 computer) and the ‘proper’ stereo doesn’t have HDMI. There are cheaper ways to get better Pi audio with a Wolfson DAC, but as a bonus, the DACMagic’s inputs can link to my existing CD player too; a respectable but budget Marantz, and also, it comes in a nice black case that looks decent next to the other gear: initial comparisons sound like the DACMagic has improved sound here too, but that could be the confirmation bias- I’ve just bought it, so it /has/ to give an improvement :-).

*OK, two things. I’m an awful luddite, it would seem.