My current music setup is a Raspberry Pi 3 with a HifiBerry DAC+ audio card as my music player. It works perfectly, except for one annoying thing. The new HifiBerry DAC+ makes an audible click or poping sound when changing the sampling rate. I have a lot of recordings in higher resolution than CD-quality of 16-bit 44kHz, so it’s jarring when it happens. I like to play my music loud which exacerbates the problem. But there’s an easy solution, and at the same time, you can get better sound quality overall. Here’s how to fix the problem.
Apple Music Streaming – It’s a No Go For Me
Apple Music
So I gave Apple Music streaming a try. Being able to just search for music and add it to my playlists sounded like a good idea. After a while the recommendations becomes rather good as well, giving me some tips of other bands I might like. But here’s the problem I have with Apple Music. When you sync your music via iCloud, you can no longer sync music via iTunes! And to be able to download music locally from Apple Music to your phone, you must use the “in the iCloud” solution. Catch–22 anyone?
HRT Headstreamer DAC USB 24-bit 96khz Headphone Amp Review
I finally got my hands on the new Headstreamer DAC headphone amplifier. I’ve been looking for a while for a DAC/headphone amplifier that works with both my Mac and iPad. The CEntrance DACport, but it’s a bit too expensive. So the Headstreamer DAC looked like a good compromise.
Modifications to the Gigaworks Ebay DAC
This is the filter changes I did to the Gigaworks DAC to remove the second opamp and to straighten out the filter section of the DAC.
You can see the original values and the values that I changed to in parenthesis. Just tap the signal from the lifted resistors (and maybe add output caps of 4.7uF) The before/after RMAA tests of the modifications can be found here.
Testing the Gigaworks DAC with mods
I’ve been modifying my Gigaworks Ebay DAC and think that the results is really showing. The second opamp is completely removed, the filter is changed to Cirrus Logics filter example from their prototype board and the first opamp is replaced with GD-Audio’s Earth discrete opamp. It sounds absolutely marvelous. Here’s the before and after graphs.