The speakers have a buzz/hum coming from them when no sound is being played. Turning it on and off causes a Pop sound from the speakers. When you do use the amplifier, it's unfortunately not any better. If you use it with headphones you can hear it, if you use the RCA out you can hear it, only way to get rid of it is to turn the amplifier off, which defeats the whole purpose of this product. If you turn on the amplifier, it introduces a terrible noise onto the circuit. The problem starts with how bad the amplifier is. Sound nice, but doesn't include it's own clock, so it's still limited in sound quality. What can I say, the DAC itself is fairly good. I think I will still buy a couple more of these because you simply can not beat the price getting a DAC and the AMP for this price. I took one star off because this does not break out any of the Pi GPIO like the Suptronics version did, so you have to get creative if you want to use any of the pins this board does not use. I have an amp board connected to the RCA output to drive another pair of speakers and so far, so good. If you are wondering, as I was, the speaker outputs and the RCA outputs do work concurrently. I connected it to outdoor speakers with 6.5" drivers and it gets far louder than I would ever be able to play it without getting an angry call from the neighbors. Some of the components get quite warm so I decided to affix some small heatsinks I had laying around just as a precaution. I am powering this with a MeanWell 24V power supply (adjusted down all the way so it's putting out about 23V with no load) and it performs well. I am using this to drive some outdoor speakers, so not in the "audiophile" realm of use cases. I haven't found a board like this yet, but I'm still hopeful.Įxcellent value. I think that functionality would be more useful than a built-in amplifier. So, it would basically have a line level active crossover for subs to feed into our choice of amplifiers. I'd just like to make a side note that what I'd really like to see is a TI 5122 DAC board for the Raspberry Pi 3B+ which has clean line-level outputs for left and right, as well as stereo subwoofer channels. This is why I dropped another half-star from my rating to arrive at 4 stars. It only happens when playing through the built-in amp. I've never had this happen while listening to the line outputs on an external amp. The sound simply shuts off very briefly for no apparent reason. There will suddenly be about 1/2 second of silence occurring at random intervals during many hours of listening. During playback, there are random dropouts of the sound. I really wanted to round my 5 and 4-star ratings up to a 5, but there is one other problem I'm having with the amplifier. So, this would normally result in an overall 4.5-star rating that would be rounded to a 5 by me. The amplifier, if reviewed separately would get a 4-star rating. For more serious listening, I would only recommend using the line outs into a better amp. I use the built-in amplifier to play background music while doing other tasks. I suggest keeping the volume below 1/3 for the best sound quality. At more moderate volumes, this amp fares much better. Unless you have really good speakers and are pushing this amp slightly hard, you may not even hear the slight distortion issues. Unfortunately, the amplifier doesn't match the quality of the DAC. I could see this being used in a boom box build or similar for example. This is great if space is at a premium and you need to drive some decent quality speakers. Then, as a bonus, there is a built-in amplifier which outputs moderately clean audio directly to speakers. In my mind, the DAC on this is a 5-star item that justifies the price on its own. If you use the line out jacks, this pristine audio can be pumped into a really clean amplifier driving high-end speakers with fantastic results. The TI 5122 DAC outputs very high-quality audio. I am using the Volumio application altered to work as a touchscreen network media player with about 230GB of music stored on the same microSD as the Raspbian OS plus access to even more music stored on a network drive. I bought this to use with a Raspberry Pi 3B + and a Sunfounder 10.1" touchscreen display.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |