Cheap eBay RPi DAC experience

Hi,

I thought I would share my experience with a cheap eBay, no name DAC.

I am new to Volumio and I was interested to try it out. I had a Raspberry Pi 3 already, so just needed a DAC. The usual brand name DACs are all good, but I just wanted something cheap to start with. I did a fair bit of searching and ended up finding something on eBay that I was willing to take a gamble on.[size=85] (I am not associated in any way.)[/size]

1x New RPI-HIFI-DAC PCM5122 HIFI DAC Audio Card Expansion Board for Raspberry Pi” - AU$39.47 delivered

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Being an electronics design engineer, the PCB layout looked OK in the pictures to me, and there were some good words in the description that sounded like they knew what they were doing. And importantly, they said the board supports I2S master clock mode.

The board eventually arrived and it looked pretty good to me. PCB quality was good, soldering was good, etc. The main issue I had was knowing how to configure Volumio to use it, the documentation was poor. Finally I figured out to tell Volumio that it was an “Allo BOSS”, the LED next to the DAC IC lit up and everything just started working.

I am not an audiophile, I am just running this in to a Yamaha RX-V540 amp with Cambridge Audio S30 speakers & Yamaha sub in my office. The sound to my ear is as good as I could hope for, no artifacts at all as far as I can tell.

Thanks to this forum, I have bluetooth on the RPi working too, so I think I am a convert and am very happy to be here.

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Cool! If searching attentively, you can find on this kind of online store like eBay a lot of things at really cheap prices…