Raspberry Pi3 & Digi+Pro

Why not try the small green computer UPNP bridge ? Then you get Roon via UPNP and you can set to WAV output on the bridge, as recommended by most on here as a benefit. I don’t have your kit level, but the sound quality into my NDX is excellent, hard to tell from Asset UPNP to WAV in my opinion. Think cost is under $300. This seems to be a little known way of getting Roon at high quality to Naim classic kit.

I'm not positive, but I think I saw a mention somewhere of powering that setup by soldering contacts directly to one of the boards, rather than using a standard adapter.

This, possibly with a linear PS, might help - perhaps Google could shed some light?

I'd be skeptical as to whether it could equal the NDS's internal streamer no matter what you do, though.

Thanks for the replies .... to be honest as it is. .the quality is pretty good given the price.....the NDS is so good over ethernet I think anything would struggle to surpass it. As a project I was going to improve the psu connection and connect the s/pdif and see how that goes....

Ultimately I think the pi needs the wireless disabling the digi + board separating using a jumper ribon . ... and two separate power supplies. Probably some shielding over RPi to try and stop rfi.....but then it starts to become something else.....

Cheers will keep you posted.

Richieroo posted:

Hi I have been using Roon and managed to build configure and install an RPi with the Digi+ Pro board ..... I am feeding this to the NDS via coaxial ..... presently, and the unit is powered by a decent little IFI psu. Everything works great ...... but I can certainly tell the difference between the NDS stream and the RPi endpoint. I will be fitting the BNC s/pdif socket shortly ..... I hope this might improve things......

Has anyone else got any ideas ..... to lift sound quality........I would like to equal the NDS ethernet if possible....

Some folks at CA find the Allo DigiOne to sound better than the HiFiBerry Digi+ Pro. You can give it a try, the only change in the configuration is that you have to replace "dtoverlay=allo-digione" with "dtoverlay=hifiberry-digi-pro" in boot/config.txt.

I have connected a DigiOne to the Naim DAC with a DC1 BNC-BNC cable. What cable do you use? If the NDS has optical inputs, you could also try to connect the Digi+ Pro via optical. Many users have found Roon not to sound as good as UPnP. Thus, it is in principle conceivable that some of the deficiencies in sound quality that you are observing are due to the fact that, on the Digi+ Pro, you stream using the Roon protocol. By contrast, on the NDS you stream using the UPnP protocol. A more fair comparison would probably be to use UPnP streaming on both devices.

You could also try to setup the Raspberry Pi that hosts your Digi+ Pro to act as an integrated UPnP server+renderer. This can be done by installing MinimServer (or any other UPnP server) and upmpdcli on the Pi. Just copy some files to the SD card or on an attached USB drive for a test. The advantage of this setup is that you do not need to transfer large files through the LAN at replay time. If your library consists of .flac files, you should probably set MinimServer to transcode to .wav. This should give you a better impression of the differences between Digi+ Pro and NDS when using the same protocol.

While the HiFiBerry Digi+ Pro and the Allo DigiOne are excellent values for money and flexibility, I would not expect them to achieve the same sound quality of the NDS. A network player like the Sonore ultraRendu or the  SoTM sMS-200ultra would likely give you a better sound quality than Raspberry Pi based devices. But it also would require a USB to S/PDIF interface to connect to the NDS. This means another cable, one more (potentially critical) power supply etc. This is the slippery slope toward full "spaghetti" solutions of the kind discussed in the CA monster thread "A novel way to massively improve ...".  

I am actually testing the DigiOne against my default system. I would be interested to know what you have found to be the major deficiencies of the Digi+ Pro against the NDS in terms of sound quality.

Hi ....Pi3 & Digi+pro & Roon via NUC v  NDS   The NDS has more detail, a wider sound stage, treble has more tonal information, bass is more accurate - the whole presentation is also more rhythmically engaging yet more relaxed. This sounds damning - but it is not - the pi to my mind is about 15% worse all round - considering its cost, it is still really good - also note I am using quite a cheap coaxial cable. Also as you validly point out some of it could be down to Roon itself. I suspect separating the power supplies and running using s/pdif would lift the quality considerably - if Hans Beekhuyzen is correct ...... (which I suspect he is!). I will keep you posted.

Richieroo posted:

Hi ....Pi3 & Digi+pro & Roon via NUC v  NDS   The NDS has more detail, a wider sound stage, treble has more tonal information, bass is more accurate - the whole presentation is also more rhythmically engaging yet more relaxed. This sounds damning - but it is not - the pi to my mind is about 15% worse all round - considering its cost, it is still really good - also note I am using quite a cheap coaxial cable. Also as you validly point out some of it could be down to Roon itself. I suspect separating the power supplies and running using s/pdif would lift the quality considerably - if Hans Beekhuyzen is correct ...... (which I suspect he is!). I will keep you posted.

Thanks for the details, very much appreciated! At CA some users find it useful to have the output of a DigiOne reclocked by a Mutec MC-3+ USB, there is a specific "Allo DigiOne in connexion with Mutec ..." thread on this. This suggests that the output of the DigiOne can be improved. To me it is not clear whether the improvements come from a better clocking, a better isolation or both. As far as I understand, the Naim DAC (and, perhaps also the internal DAC of the NDS) overrided the clocking of incoming S/PDIF streams before entering the digital to analogue conversion stage. This would suggest that isolation is perhaps more crucial than clocking. I would expect the NDS to provide better isolation than the RPi + DigiOne combo. Magna HiFi is also offering a Roon ready device based on a Raspberry Pi, with integrated linear power supply and optional BNC connector. It is called Mano Music Server and can be ordered with an optional LAN galvanic isolator.