RASPBERRY Hi-Fi-Pi

The Pi’s onboard analogue audio capabilities are nothing to write home about. This doesn’t really matter if it’s just making the occasional beep-bop. And it’s totally irrelevant if you’re playing audio via the HDMI port (so that your TV or digital receiver is doing the digitalanalogue conversion). But if you want to hook up an old analogue amplifier to your Pi, you’d best get yourself a dedicated DAC first, otherwise things will sound hollow, lacking in range. The headphone jack will also pick up noise and static from other components.

Coming to our rescue, then, are a variety of DAC (digital analogue converter) HAT boards that enable faithful audio reproduction for not much money. We tested the IQaudIO DAC+ HAT, which enables glorious 24-bit 192kHz audio reproduction. It takes the digital audio signal from the Pi via the I2S protocol and delivers it to its own high-fidelity DAC.

There are other manufacturers too, such as HiFiBerry and Allo (which even offers a separate reclocking unit to circumvent oddities from resampling audio signals). Some HATs even feature a built-in amplifier, so you can make a tiny 35 watts-per-channel boombox. We preferred the idea of using our quality 1990s amplifiers though, and found IQaudIO’s offering produced a sound that was most satisfactory – except to our neighbours; they, it turns out, do not like psytrance.

Historically we’ve recommended using Volumio (https://volumio.org) and it’s still great, but it’s well worth checking out RuneAudio too at https:// runeaudio.com.