Denon PMA 50

Hi all
I have a Denon PMA 50 DAC/Amplifier since a few weeks. It is a wonderful piece of kit, sounds great and accepts everything you can throw at it, be it PCM or DSD. My music sits on a Synology NAS and is mainly in FLAC, DSF and SACD ISO Format.
I would like to play SACD ISOs natively with a Raspberry Pi 2 and Volumio through USB to the Denon. Has anyone tried this. Can anyone confirm whether the Denon is compatible with Volumio?
I would hate to have to use a heavy hitting Intel i5 NUC besides the Denon. A Raspberry would be much prettier.
Thanks a lot for any feedback.
Rudi

Hi,

If you’re going USB through to the Denon, then USB is pretty much USB, and doesn’t much matter where you get it from. On a RPi there are things you need to do to minimise the load on the USB/Etherrnet interface, and it’s that load that causes the clicks and problems talked about. Offloading the problem to an onboard DAC or interface gets away from that problem area. Since you presumably want to use the Denon DAC, I’d suggest a HiFiBerry Digi or Digi+, depending upon the age of your RPi. This then connects nicely from the SP/DIF to the Denon via coax and you have all that lovely bandwidth.

That will then play FLAC (which is how I do things) but I’ve not tried DSD. However, a brief search reveals this: gadgets.itwriting.com/3264-playi … lumio.html. That shows how it may be done…

Chris M

Thanks, Chris
I’ll give that a try
Rudi