Hdmi, DSD, and sacd iso

Volumio Development Suggest a feature
1

Hi Everyone,

I’d like to suggest a set of features for the next version. It has been a year or so since I wanted theses features and I patiently waited for them to be naturally implemented since you can have them in other Pi distributions (Moode,…)

1/
I would like to be able to use the HDMI out of the raspberry to output audio efficiently, without any downsampling. I don’t understand why Volumio team stick to the old kernel/Alsa layer, that force any audio format to be downsampled to 16/48khz stereo using HDMI out.
I would like to be able to make full use of the HDMI output : up to 192 Khz / 24 bits (or 384khz), multichannel, and DSD transport (DSD64 and DSD128).

Most of the time I use Volumio to feed a usb stereo DAC that is exclusively connected to my Headphone amp, but I want to be able to switch to HDMI output to play on my multichannel amp, when I want to enjoy room music with family and friends. A part of my collection is multichannel (DSD multichannel, Multichannel FLAC…) and a fully fledged HDMI output could handle that and feed my amplifier directly.

2/
The second feature I ask is a full SACD / DSD support : Yes I want to be able to output multichannel DSD through HDMI (covered in point 1), but I also want to be able to handle SACD ISO directly like a folder or a CUE sheet, to be able to select the stereo or multichannel layer and to play it nicely without re-sampling.
Playing multichannel DSD files, from a SACD ISO or from a DSF/DFF file extracted from SACD iso (a pain in the…time consuming operation BTW), can be tricky because most of the time the multichannel layer is encoded in DST, to save space (a SACD has roughly the same size as a DVD, 4,7 GB). It would be nice to be able to play DST directly without having to decompress it to DSD.

The lack of theses two features makes me use different solutions and I have to plug and unplug cables frequently.

Adding theses two features would help Volumio to achieve the “audiophile reference” status for Raspberry pi users. Moode does it in an inconvenient way, I far prefer Volumio UI and ergonomics.

Thanks for reading ! I hope you work on this

2

Long time ago I read in a forum regarding NAD N51 (the only device I know that has an HDMI audio output) that indeed HDMI audio had been implemented much better than all that USB audio stuff, just because of all the blurays with live music, concerts, OST, and others, they implemented in a way that sounds or at least could sound much naturally than USB audio or COAX audio… Well, it makes sense to me …

3

Are all those features in the recent versions of Volumio?
I have the exact same use case.
I typically use DLNA for most play back to my Sony receiver but have to burn the iso to play on the SACD player in multichannel via HDMI.
Doing all this via Volumio instead would be nice.
Either on a raspberry pi or I also use a small Acer Aspire pc with also HDMI controlled by a Nvidia Ion chip.

4

Multichannel would really be great!!

Cheers, Stefan

5

I support this. High sample rate, multichannel and Multichannel SACD are my main file formats. How can we help make this happen?