06-05-2021, 08:33 PM
(06-05-2021, 04:06 PM)jonners Wrote: The RPi 3B+ is certainly capable of great sound with the right DAC. I suspect that it might be showing up the deficiences in your DDA-100, which were previously concealed by the Windows setup. Lower-priced DACs have improved vastly in recent years, so I would recommend having a listen to what the Pi can do with a good budget Topping or SMSL DAC if you can.
A low quality link of the chain might be an explanation (although I would probably blame the speakers more than the amplifier). But I am sure that the sound quality is noticebly worse with the Moode/Raspberry than with JRiver/Windows 10. I already experienced in the past the bad registrations' defects coming out due to a good quality system and this is not the case: I tested all the good registrations I have and in all of them the sound is more inaccurate with the Raspberry.
Since I don't believe that a digital player might "colour" the source or modify the original equalization, there must be some differences in the jitter or something like that between the Windows computer and the Raspberry. At the moment I am not intentioned in changing my equipment (and I am going to buy new speakers as the next step) so I will make some tests in order to understand which is the point:
1. trying a different power supplier for the Raspberry;
2. Trying a different OS/player for the Raspberry;
3. Look for ways for improving the management of the USB audio output, if any. Some people tell they found sensible improvement in the sound quality using a dedicated USB "clean" port such the one the Allo's stuff, but I am a bit sceptic and would like to verify ther real benefits of spending money for useless components (although I might have an SPDIF and coaxial output in addition to the USB adding a dedicated hat).
As for the DDA-100, I would not consider it as a low-priced DAC: in fact I compared it to many other amplifiers (up to 2000 €) and finally chose it for (in my my opinion) a better overall quality, at the cost of exclusively digital inputs, some limitations in the dynamics, and ad input rate limited to 24 bits/96 KHz for the USB input. The precision and details of this amplifier are really amazing (it suffers a bit with big orchestras of course) and when I will upgrade the amplifier I am going to look again for a direct digital class D solution, if possibile.
