The PiCorePlayer is fantastic. It is super straight-forward to install and setup is very simple as well. You can attach a usb stick with music plug & play without having to bother about mounting disks etc. It integrate seamlessly to a LMS.
After some discussions earlier and not being sure if it can play DSD, I tested it's abilities this weekend, I only had the IQAdui Pi-Dac+ and the Pi-DigiAmp+
- It loads into memory after a very quick boot (? 5 seconds) no risk of a power-off corrupting files.
- Write image (<100MB) to SD card, plug in, start, set initial settings via web browser interface and you are good to go.
- It can serve as a media server as well.
- It uses sqeezelite, the exact same emulator that is included in the Squeezebox Touch firmware (in fact, Squeezelite predates the Squeezebox Touch)
- It plays DSD over PCM (you have to enable a tick-box in the settings and you must install an add-on for LMS)
- It support bit-rates up to 32 bit / 384 kHz.
- It can sync with other players for multi-room audio, and I could here no audible jitter.
- The speed, class and size of the SD card does not matter as all gets loaded into memory. 1GB is more than sufficient, if you still have any of those around.
- Very easy to control via LMS web GUI or with very user friendly and ergonomic remaote apps for iOS / Android /Windows phone (The windows app not on par with the quality of the other two.
I also tested and compared the sound vs the DAC integrated in my amp, with very good results. Apart from that the Pi-Dac+ with Raspberry costs far less, the sound quality is almost identical, but the NAD uses the Cirrus Logic CS4398 chip (also the one used in the Marantz SA8003, has a DSD decoder on board, though seemingly pointless as LMS can feed it only with PCM?) and the DAC boards from IQ Audio uses the TI / Burr Brown PCM1522
When the Pi Zero becomes available, I would like to see if the same effect can be set up with a Pi Zero and a PiDacZero (with the same TI DAC as the other to IQ Audio DAC's, that would be brilliantly cheap!
But the real beauty of PiCorePLayer, is that it removes all the software issues with the dowlaoded, ready-to-use images and that it sounds relly superb.
After some discussions earlier and not being sure if it can play DSD, I tested it's abilities this weekend, I only had the IQAdui Pi-Dac+ and the Pi-DigiAmp+
- It loads into memory after a very quick boot (? 5 seconds) no risk of a power-off corrupting files.
- Write image (<100MB) to SD card, plug in, start, set initial settings via web browser interface and you are good to go.
- It can serve as a media server as well.
- It uses sqeezelite, the exact same emulator that is included in the Squeezebox Touch firmware (in fact, Squeezelite predates the Squeezebox Touch)
- It plays DSD over PCM (you have to enable a tick-box in the settings and you must install an add-on for LMS)
- It support bit-rates up to 32 bit / 384 kHz.
- It can sync with other players for multi-room audio, and I could here no audible jitter.
- The speed, class and size of the SD card does not matter as all gets loaded into memory. 1GB is more than sufficient, if you still have any of those around.
- Very easy to control via LMS web GUI or with very user friendly and ergonomic remaote apps for iOS / Android /Windows phone (The windows app not on par with the quality of the other two.
I also tested and compared the sound vs the DAC integrated in my amp, with very good results. Apart from that the Pi-Dac+ with Raspberry costs far less, the sound quality is almost identical, but the NAD uses the Cirrus Logic CS4398 chip (also the one used in the Marantz SA8003, has a DSD decoder on board, though seemingly pointless as LMS can feed it only with PCM?) and the DAC boards from IQ Audio uses the TI / Burr Brown PCM1522
When the Pi Zero becomes available, I would like to see if the same effect can be set up with a Pi Zero and a PiDacZero (with the same TI DAC as the other to IQ Audio DAC's, that would be brilliantly cheap!
But the real beauty of PiCorePLayer, is that it removes all the software issues with the dowlaoded, ready-to-use images and that it sounds relly superb.
