Cheap MQA streaming recipe.

[wetowne 250]

Basic ingredients for an under 200 dollar MQA capable streamer. I'll cook it up a little later and see if it's tasty. I suspect it will be.

[Schu 5010]

is this an exercise in economics?

[wetowne 250]

13 hours ago, Schu said:

is this an exercise in economics?

For me it's always an exercise in economics.

[Godataloss 87]

Following.

[Shiva 2622]

I have heard many good things about the Raspberry pi over the years.   

 

[rplace 3283]

I've got two RPi 4s feeding two different DACs. They make fantastic Roon endpoints.

[wetowne 250]

I'm running Volumio on the Pi. I was misinformed or perhaps I misunderstood that Volumio would fully render MQA using a Dragonfly DAC.  Apparently Volumio will only work with a full MQA decoder DAC, the Dragonfly is only a "renderer", it needs a file that is already partially "unfolded" and then it will do the second unfold.

In that sense my little project failed but it still is a great sounding streamer. (MQA is not essential to me and is a whole other debate that I'm not getting into.)

It also allowed me to get away from using a DNLA server that was causing some problems with my local files. Now all three of my systems are using Volumio based Rpi streamers.

I'm using the red dragonfly rather than the black which sounds noticeably better.

Still a success for me.

[Shiva 2622]

Nicely done.  Yeah, the MQA unfolding process is confusing.    

[rplace 3283]

If you are looking to literally be cool, check out the RPi case from Flirc. The entire case acts as a heat sink. In my room the Flirc pi run about 10 degrees Celsius cooler than the other case as reported by the internal system temp.