Reclocker suggestions?

[Gaspar74]

heres a pic of my digi2 pro

[Gaspar74]

going for it. its hooked up now, lets see

[Gaspar74]

here is it working. need clean it up a bit inside but alls good and sounds awesoe. Can I tell a difference from not having the digi clcocks. not really.

[hifinet]

A master DAC like the HiFiBerry DAC+ Pro should also work like this? Needs a header soldered.

[ECELO]

@Gaspar74 just stack the Hifiberry Digi+ Pro or Digi2 Pro on the Pi and stack the Protodac on that 40 pins GPIO header (sandwich of 3).
Select as audio card the Hifiberry Digi Pro. Make sure you just playback 16bits and don't forget to inverse the audio.

@DRONE7 concerning the Digi2 Pro; that is about the separate I2S header, no need with the Protodac it is directly connected to the 40 pins GPIO header. And if you need the I2S signals for an external DAC (which doesn't have the Pi GPIO header) you can just breakout this signals from the 40 pins GPIO header.

Hi, do you think it could work in the same way with an Innomaker Pi HIFI DAC which is basically a clone of the HIFIBerry DAC? This board has two quartz oscillators for generating the MasterClock and is much cheaper than the original and since the function would only be to generate the master clock it would be an economical and interesting option.

[hifinet]

Hi, do you think it could work in the same way with an Innomaker Pi HIFI DAC which is basically a clone of the HIFIBerry DAC? This board has two quartz oscillators for generating the MasterClock and is much cheaper than the original and since the function would only be to generate the master clock it would be an economical and interesting option.

Maybe the XO quality isn't as good? Innomaker uses SCTF (Shenzhen SCTF Electronics Co), looking at the photo of the PCB. Lower cost due to lower quality parts? But having a XO for 44.1 should still be better than RPi based clocking.

I happened to look at the XO on my Allo Kali, which has an NDK ($2.81 each) with 43fs phase jitter.

[ECELO]

Hi, do you think it could work in the same way with an Innomaker Pi HIFI DAC which is basically a clone of the HIFIBerry DAC? This board has two quartz oscillators for generating the MasterClock and is much cheaper than the original and since the function would only be to generate the master clock it would be an economical and interesting option.

Maybe the XO quality isn't as good? Innomaker uses SCTF (Shenzhen SCTF Electronics Co), looking at the photo of the PCB. Lower cost due to lower quality parts? But having a XO for 44.1 should still be better than RPi based clocking.

I happened to look at the XO on my Allo Kali, which has an NDK ($2.81 each) with 43fs phase jitter.

OK, in the end I opted for a HiFiBerry Digi 2 Pro which I placed between the RPI pi3b+ and the ProtoDac. It works without problems and the audio quality is significantly improved with better audio separation and greater dynamic depth, but is there a way to check if the crystal oscillators are actually working or if it is simply psychoacoustics?

[Gaspar74]

I beleive that by choosing the Digi2 as the dac it engages the clocks. I also noticed an improvement. During my research I picked up a Raspi-4137 which is a upsampler board using AK4137eq chip. UPsamples the incoming stream. Trying to figure out how to utilize it now properly and if it even makes sense to.

[hifinet]

If it is that dramatic, I am sure it is not psychoacoustic. If it is, who cares. You could do a single blind test. Have someone switch the I2S DAC settings. If you can pick 6 out of 6 correctly, that is two standard deviations certainty against psychoacoustic. Listen to it for a week with various recordings you know. Then go back and see if you can stand to listen to it.

With the AK4137, set it for no upsampling, i.e. the same bitrate. It also reclocks the I2S signals. If you upsample, it will be doing something similar to an oversampling chip, and it has a choice of filter settings. You don't want that. The AK4137 can go into a bypass mode, which only does the reclocking, but I am not sure that the board can set bypass mode. The closest would be to set the outgoing sample rate the same as the incoming sample rate.

These boards were being used to convert PCM to DSD, sent to a DSD capable DAC chip. That also might be worth checking out. DSD playback is nonoversampling. All that dithered ultrasonic noise is present in the output signal.

[Gaspar74]

Hi, do you think it could work in the same way with an Innomaker Pi HIFI DAC which is basically a clone of the HIFIBerry DAC? This board has two quartz oscillators for generating the MasterClock and is much cheaper than the original and since the function would only be to generate the master clock it would be an economical and interesting option.

Maybe the XO quality isn't as good? Innomaker uses SCTF (Shenzhen SCTF Electronics Co), looking at the photo of the PCB. Lower cost due to lower quality parts? But having a XO for 44.1 should still be better than RPi based clocking.

I happened to look at the XO on my Allo Kali, which has an NDK ($2.81 each) with 43fs phase jitter.

OK, in the end I opted for a HiFiBerry Digi 2 Pro which I placed between the RPI pi3b+ and the ProtoDac. It works without problems and the audio quality is significantly improved with better audio separation and greater dynamic depth, but is there a way to check if the crystal oscillators are actually working or if it is simply psychoacoustics?

Trying to figure out what the 10 pin output on the 4137 is in relation to the GPIO pins of the protodac. Here is the pin outs