I’m no Linux expert nor I am a freak in electronics. But with the help of this and several other forums I was able to build my own music machine using a raspberry pi3 running a linux distro. My first priority was mqa-capability. Since there are just a few mqa-enabled devices available, there is only limited information on a linux based raspi-streamer to be found on the net. So I had to try and err…
I bought a meridian explorer2, as it is the most affordable mqa-device on the market. This may not be the top end DAC, but for my setting it is (after getting it all to work) the best fit.
I tried several audiophile distro’s (runeaudio, moode, etc). But none of them gave me results like volumio.
To play/stream mqa music files you need bitperfect processing.
All distros I tested were able to process bitperfect, but only under certain conditions- that is
volume normalization-disable
resampling- disable
any sound effects-disable
volume control by software-disable
volume control off or by hardware-enabled
The latter point was the key point.
As I use a power amplifier with no pre-amp, the meridian dac has to do the job of the preamp. The explorer2 has an excellent headphone amplifier with a pure analog volume control- no digital volume control, so the bit-depth is not altered by volume changes!.. and the file processing is still bitperfect.
The only Linux distro I found to have good implementation of hardware volume control for the meridian explorer2 … is volumio 2!
During my testing I realized a very cool feature of the meridian explorer2 that i wasnt aware of at the very beginning.
The explorer2 has three status led, showing at which sampling frequency you run. Additionally the first led changes from white to green if the streamed file is standard mqa encoded. It changes to blue if the file is studio-master mqa encoded.
While listening my mqa with different linux distros the blue or green led changed to white immediatelly, when activating software volume control, volume normalization etc…thus indicating, there is no bitperfect processing anymore.
Hence, with this fancy feature I was able to check bitperfect processing at any stage of my test parcour.
At the end I have an excellent sounding, very stable (no drop-outs, clicks, etc), very responsive streaming-DAC system with the upcoming sophisticated mqa standard onboard for less than 300€.
The only shortcoming I found is a problem of shuting down the raspberry using the webinterface. Any comments are appreciated!
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