Very happy to report that I have my new Tinker Board arrived today and it’s up and running Volumio! I am using the USB output to OPPO BDP-105 DAC input. The music sources are streamed from my WDMyCloudMirror NAS. Very happy with the results. No clicks and pops. Sound quality is clean and stable. (I have very picky ears…)
Good job, Volumio Dev team!
After the long struggle with RPi 3B’s clicks and pops on my setup mentioned above, I finally gave up and decided to give Tinker Board a shot since I saw it has dedicated hardwares for USB / Ethernet. I am glad that I did.
So far, I have tried the Audio Jack ouput. It has pretty decent audio quality. Much much better than RPi 3B. Not a surprise.
As for the heating problem reported earlier, I happen to have an extra heat sink at hand. So I put the big heat sink on top of the factory supply heat sink. In between, there is a high heat conducting thermal pad. So far, it’s working fine. After I learn the command to report the CPU temperature, I will report.
P.S. The library scan is a lot faster than RPi 3B.
I know it’s very ugly, hahaha. But it keeps the CPU cool…
BTW, I do notice there are occasional dropouts! When it happens, it’s a few tenths of a second. Very noticeable and annoying!
I wonder what’s causing that… I suspect there might be some bug in the buffering algorithm.
After more listening, the “dropouts” can be as long as several seconds. It’s more like a pause. And it’s intermittent, i.e., in a random fashion. It can run for more than ten minutes without a glitch and then it happens.
Does not seem like a hardware problem for me. Any thought?
You don’t say if you are using wired or wifi connection to your NAS. If the latter, then I would try wired if possible to rule out WiFi problems. You could also try playing music locally…from usb stick or the samba share on your sd card. Not solutions, but fishing for clues
I tried playing music from the USB flash drive. No problem at all.
The problem occurs while I play back music from NAS through WiFi. It can run fine for hours and then becomes erratic all of a sudden. I increased the buffer size to 12 MB, 40% in the setting. Still bad.
Could it be my WDMyCloudMirror NAS was doing something in the background (say, mirroring???) and therefore not able to keep up with the music streaming? But while I WiFi stream it to OPPO BDP-105 directly, there has been no problem at all. And I have not had any problem while watching videos stored on NAS through WiFi. Audio files should be a lot easier…
The WiFi signal seems strong enough and Volumio is showing 72.2 Mb/sec. While I pinged Volumio, I did notice there were a couple of responses showing > 10 ms. (Shown below). Not sure if this means anything though.
I have not tried wired ethernet yet. Will report back.
$ ping volumio
PING volumio (192.168.1.27): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 192.168.1.27: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=3.918 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.27: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=17.652 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.27: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=3.095 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.27: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=3.653 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.27: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=4.197 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.27: icmp_seq=5 ttl=64 time=3.253 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.27: icmp_seq=6 ttl=64 time=4.142 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.27: icmp_seq=7 ttl=64 time=4.688 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.27: icmp_seq=8 ttl=64 time=4.065 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.27: icmp_seq=9 ttl=64 time=4.097 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.27: icmp_seq=10 ttl=64 time=3.378 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.27: icmp_seq=11 ttl=64 time=3.506 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.27: icmp_seq=12 ttl=64 time=14.049 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.27: icmp_seq=13 ttl=64 time=5.566 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.27: icmp_seq=14 ttl=64 time=3.307 ms
Playing 16bit/44KHz music seems to only mildly increase the temperature. About 1~2 deg increase.
I think, even only with the supplied tiny heat sink, for music playback purpose, tinker board will be OK. Not sure about 4K video applicaiton.
I have had my Tinker Board (original model, not the new model) up and running for many months and it has been great, including via wireless, controlling from i-phone, and playing off of i-phone all my tunes on a WD My Cloud. Emotiva DAC. Works with you tube, radio, etc. DAC is only good to 96 hz, so no real opportunity to test hi-rez. As you indicate, I have no real problem with the headphone out, either. Not the best headphone experience, but OK for sure.
