Introducing myself and my setup

[ovizii]

Hi everyone,

I recently purchased an Allo miniboss player => https://allo.com/sparky/miniboss-player.html 
which includes a RPI zero W with MiniBoss DAC PCM5122 32bit 384kHz  and a Volt+ AMP 

I have currently hooked it up to 2x Monitor Audio Bronze 100 speakers, although I might swap the speakers at some point in time.

I know the RPI zero W is very low powered so I was looking for a simple solution to stream music from my android phone. I am not planning to add a library to the RPI just stream via BubbleUPnP from my phone and occasionally listen to a radio station. 

I'm still experimenting with moodeaudio, optimzing settings, looking for the best/simplest apps. Currently, I'm quite happy with BubbleUPnP and MALP (mpd client I use to play the radio stations setup on RPI itself).

[the_bertrum]

Welcome,
I have a moOde system running on a Pi Zero W and it is more than powerful enough to run the moOde interface and wirelessly connect to my library stored on a NAS. Spotify connect, Bluetooth, OpenHome, and the moOde UI are all viable. It struggles with DSP functions, but all the rest is perfectly within the ability of the Pi Zero.

[ovizii]

Thanks for chiming in, so far I have enabled Bluetooth for the odd occasion, UPnP and both work well so far. I won't touch DSP as the whole setup immediately becomes unresponsive. 

So simply streaming via UPnP with no DSP, this is the audio info I get and I am wondering if the original bit depth was 24bit or did this change when being decoded? 
Also, who makes those changes you can see in the output rate ? I assume its the DAC on its own?

INPUT / OUTPUT
Sourcehttp://192.168.8.156:57645/external/audio/media/40025.m4a
Encoded atUnknown
Decoded to24 bit, 44.1 kHz, Stereo, 128 kbps
Output rate32 bit, 44.1 kHz, Stereo, 2.822 Mbps
Output modeALSA Default (plughw)
Output chainMPD -> plughw -> Device

[Tim Curtis]

The audio CODEC for the format being played determines "Decoded to". In your case the format is m4a which is prolly decoded by ffmpeg.

MPD and ALSA use what the audio device reports that it supports as far as bit depth and sample rates go to determine "Output rate". For example if an audio device reports that it only accepts 32-bit word length then ALSA will zero-pad 16 and 24 bit format to 32-bit.

[ovizii]

The audio CODEC for the format being played determines "Decoded to". In your case the format is m4a which is prolly decoded by ffmpeg.

MPD and ALSA use what the audio device reports that it supports as far as bit depth and sample rates go to determine "Output rate". For example if an audio device reports that it only accepts 32-bit word length then ALSA will zero-pad 16 and 24 bit format to 32-bit.

Thanks, then this looks like all is well and there's no unnecessary up/down sampling going on just what the hardware needs. Thanks for the friendly greeting, I will keep reading the forum and open my own threads once I hit a snag, let me not pollute this introductory thread any further. :-)

[ovizii]

Just wanted to thank you again for explaining the correlation between the codec and the "decoded to".

I have switched to using Air Music on my Android phone as it has many more options, is cleaner than all other apps and has a magisk module which I can smoothly run on my rooted phone. The only question I have, since I am using it to stream to moOde via UPnP just like I used to with the other apps I tested, somehow it always streams via LPCM so moOde no longer sees the original codec so it decodes like this:

INPUT / OUTPUT
Sourcehttp://192.168.8.156:39031/AirMusic.LPCM
Encoded atUnknown
Decoded to16 bit, 44.1 kHz, Stereo,
Output rate16 bit, 44.1 kHz, Stereo, 1.411 Mbps
Output modeALSA Default (plughw)
Output chainMPD -> plughw -> Device

Keep in mind, this is the same .m4a file being played as above. Am I losing quality anywhere? I can't hear a difference to the other app where it was being decoded to 24 bit and Output at 32 bit.

I don't care that it also no longer streams any information about what is being played as I'm the only user and I can see what I am playing on my phone.