
Raspberry Pi gets its own sound card - neya
http://www.engadget.com/2014/03/11/raspberry-pi-wolfson-audio-card/?
======
bananas
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.

~~~
throwawayaway
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.

~~~
jrabone
_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...

~~~
arm
No need for formatting; you can easily get superscripts and subscripts in
plain text. See Unicode’s Superscripts and Subscripts Block¹.

――――――

¹ —
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_supersc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_superscripts)

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ctz
Link: [http://uk.farnell.com/wolfson-microelectronics/wolfson-
audio...](http://uk.farnell.com/wolfson-microelectronics/wolfson-audio-
card/audio-card-for-use-with-raspberry/dp/2347264)

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

~~~
omh
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](http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1929)

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DiabloD3
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
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
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.

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nitrogen
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
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.

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

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

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

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

~~~
jrabone
That should be pretty easy to demonstrate by feeding the output back into a
decent 16-bit soundcard - the noise floor should reveal any dithering going on
(and if there's no dithering it will be painfully obvious that there's only
2048 discrete output values...)

I might have a go tonight.

~~~
throwawayaway
[http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?p=103330](http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?p=103330)
Might be of interest to you.

