Kali Master Clock Question

Audio Gear DACs
1

Hi All,

I recently purchased a Kali and Piano 2.1 from Allo. I really like them but I have not been able to successfully get them to work with Volumio if I use the Kali master clock, which was the whole purpose of buying the Kali.

I have tried using volumio-2.348-2017-12-22-pi.img and volumio-2.362-2018-02-12-pi.img and both play fine until I set the glb_mclk parameter, which as I understand, enables the Kali master clock. Then the music “plays” but there is no sound at all.

The only thing I am changing is the parameter, nothing else. Perhaps that is my error. If there is something else I must do, I hope someone can inform me. Does anyone have this working with Volumio? If not, can anyone confirm it works with any other software?

My Config.txt file looks like this:

[code]initramfs volumio.initrd
gpu_mem=16
max_usb_current=1
dtparam=audio=on
audio_pwm_mode=2
dtparam=i2c_arm=on
disable_splash=1
hdmi_force_hotplug=1

Volumio i2s setting below: do not alter

dtoverlay=allo-piano-dac-plus-pcm512x-audio,glb_mclk
[/code]

Thanks in advance for any help.
Doug

2

As far as I understand you need to make sure you feed it 352.8/384 khz samplerate material as this is the base rate of the 2 DAC chips. With the setting enable, the DAC chips do not internally upsample anymore.

You could activate Volumio’s resampling to first upsample before outputting it.

Not sure which resampler Volumio uses but their are some ideas that certain software based upsamplers can do it better than the hardware of the DAC.

But I could be totally wrong here…

Verzonden vanaf mijn iPhone met Tapatalk

3

Hi,

Did you use it as 2.1 mode?

There is no settings of PurePath flow of 352.8/384 khz which are requred by miniDSP function.

4

You may also need to upsample to 32 bit, if Volumio will do that.

5

I used dual-mono mode. Haven’t looked into 2.1 yet, or pure path.

Also, I have found that it plays when resampled to 32/384, but I read somewhere that is a workaround for a bug in the driver, or maybe volumio. The info from Allo doesn’t mention this as a requirement as far as I can tell.

For what it’s worth, I have moved on to picoreplayer and it plays using the master clock enabled. Not sure about any resampling though, as I’m just getting started.

Sent from my SM-N950U1 using Tapatalk

6

I have the same behaviour: kali + piano 2.1 do only work in Volumio when I enable resampling en settings on 32/384. When I disable resampling I can only play 44/16 music, no hi-res. When I play hi-res, I hear a loud hiss.
It should be to work without software resampling yet?

7

Version 2.387 (23-03-2018) works.
PI Kernel 4.14.29 seems the reason, from version 2.389
for me it works

8

JosV, the hiss is a kernel bug with 24-bit I2S. 16 and 32 bit material both work okay. 24 needs to be upsampled to 32.