I’ve moved over from Squeezebox server to Roon as my multi-room music playback system. The new system works wonderfully, and I love it. However, there’s one thing that I’ve had a problem with, and that’s getting Apples AirPlay to work reliably with my Roon Raspberry Pi endpoints running Diet-Pi Linux. The Shairport-sync constantly crashed. After searching around the net, I found a solution to my problem.
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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.
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.
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.
So I bought this Pioneer PD S-505 for $40 to test how good audio quality I’m able to squeeze out by modifying it. But It will not be just the standard subjective judgment of improvement but also measurements. Back in 2000, you had to pay about $400 for it. It uses the stable platter which means you have to put the CD in upside down. So let’s get going.