I'd love to be able to stack two or more amps on the same Raspberry Pi, where each appears as a separate audio interface and so I can toggle the rooms separately.
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8 comments
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HiFiBerry team Hi,
unfortunately this isn't possible. The Raspberry Pi doesn't have a bus that is designed to support multiple audio interfaces. You will need a separate Raspberry Pi for each Amp.
Best regards,
Daniel -
bjn Hm, in that case, what if they were USB audio interfaces? I guess that would then not be necessarily Raspberry Pi centric, and so may not be your focus. Any idea if such a thing exists, with outputs for passive speakers?
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HiFiBerry team In theory that might work, but I definitely wouldn't recommend multiple USB audio interfaces on the Raspberry Pi. The USB interface bandwidth is limited and even higher sample rates with a single USB audio interface can sometimes create problems.
Best regards,
Daniel -
HiFiBerry team BTW: Having a decentralised installation with a Raspberry Pi/Amp combination is every rooms has quite a lot of advantages: You save in cabling. But even more important: Speaker cables are much shorter with this. With very long speaker cables, bass frequency response of the speaker usually changes as the resistance of the cable impacts the whole setup. It might not have a huge impact, but this depends a lot on the speakers and the resistance of the cables. With 8 Ohm speakers, the impact will be much less than with 4 Ohm speakers.
Best regards,
Daniel -
bjn Surely it's going to be nigh-impossible to get playback perfectly in sync with that approach, though?
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HiFiBerry team In a multi-room setup, the out-of-sync problem is the speed of sound itself. Synchronising multiple sources to a few milliseconds isn't a problem with modern multiroom software (Have a look at Max2Play or Roon). However, just to travel 1 meter takes the sound already about 3ms. Having two sources in different rooms only 5m away will give you a difference of 15ms. This always changes with your position. So, it will never play perfectly in sync.
Best regards,
Daniel -
bjn Then software is better than I thought. I use MPD and last time I looked, the best (only?) solution for syncing multiple MPDs is this: https://github.com/alphapapa/mpdsync which didn't work very well at all for me.
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HiFiBerry team Good multiroom software always synchronized multiple clients by adapting the playback rate of each client from a central server. MPD wasn't developed as a multiroom software. Therefore it doesn't have features like this.
Best regards,
Daniel
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