Wednesday, August 17, 2016

retroPi - dedicated, high performnace, inexpesnive, compact music servers.




A Tri-Pi or a Trio of Raspberry Pi(s). retro-thermionic has moved into the Pi business. Computer or laptop based music was never really convenient, always noisy and rarely worked that well. You had to have drivers loaded and purchase software to organise and play your music files.The Pi, dedicated, high performance credit card size computer, makes the modern music server a reality. Controlled from the browser on any smart phone, iPad or laptop and music stored as files on any drive type, listening to high quality music never got easier or cheaper.

The Pis being credit card size can be fitted with credit card size, DACs, Optical and digital interface or just connect via HDMI to any DAC or amplifier. DSD DAC cards can be purchased inexpensively. For a few hundred dollars you can have a very high performance music server player anything from MP3s to DSD files.

Above are three very different looking and configured Pis. Two Pi2Bs and one Pi3B. The Pi3B is use with a USB DSD XMOS DAC whose quality exceeds the Sabre32 DAC in my Oppo 95! One of the Pi2Bs is fitted with a Optical and Digital interface card to work with current DACs with digital interfaces.

The Pi3B have a quad core, 64bit 1.1GHz processor and when paired with a suitable DAC and supported by Volumio or Runeaudo free (Linux based) software bring file based audio to the fore. A must of any hardcore music lover.

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