in the past few months we have worked very hard on a new shield for RPIs/SBCs.
Basically the main idea belongs to Ian’s. His hardware is actually superior to ours , mostly in the way he implemented the clocks and to the attention of the detail (like mounting xtals on a pcb supported by elastics ). So we credit Ian’s idea and his great design.
Our hardware/soft is not a copy , its an implementation of the same idea. We use a FPGA and sram to buffer the DATA and we reclock bclk/mclk outside the FPGA using NDK (or Crystek) . The board has an eprom but its not HAT complaint (because of the space). FCC will be available for the board.
Main reason for making the board was to try to correct the audio clocks of SBCs and bring high quality audio to anyone that has an SBC around…for a great price.
I’m listening in this moment at this new solution (Kali reclocker + Piano DAC on RPI3) and I’m literally blown away…
Never heard this amount of details, flowing naturally. Not to mention the stereo image…
Guys, THIS IS A GAMECHANGER… I mean it…
No, just regular PI3 volumio… You can attach the Kali Reclocker on the PI and then the Piano on TOP. Rembember to move the little switch on the Piano to “Pi Compatibility” position
please help me understand better
so you have the hifiberry digi+ taking the signal from your RPI (i assume) and sending it SPDIF to your DAC (what kind of DAC is it?).
you want to know if you can put a KALI between the hifiberry and your dac ?
Indeed the Hifiberry Digi+ gets its i2s signal from an RPi B+ at the moment. It is a HAT board but the idea is indeed placing the KALI between the RPi and the Digi+ if that makes sense.
The DAC I am using is an Audio-GD nfb-11, see http://audio-gd.com/Pro/Headphoneamp/NFB112014/NFB112014EN.htm (see also my signature, but I guess you don’t see signatures when using something like Tapatalk ). I feed it through the RCA Coaxial SPDIF input.
Feeding it via USB is also an option but the Pi is very bad in providing a clean/proper USB signal for audio. But in theory USB could be preferred as if the DAC’s USB input would be in ‘master’ mode (and not ‘slave’ to the USB signal coming from the Pi) there would be no need to do re-clocking as the clocking could be done by the DAC (assuming it is also capable of generating a proper clock signal by itself).
Does this info help? Am I correct in assuming that most DAC’s generate their clock signal based on the incoming SPDIF signal (when SPDIF is the used input method)?
The Digi+ is a HAT board that takes its (5v) power directly from the GPIO pins.
Would the KALI power both the RPi and any HAT board on top?
I understand what you are saying but as the KALI board is an independent board, I would assume it is ment for use with any HAT board that would benefit from an improved clock signal coming from the GPIO pins?