No sound playing on Pi Zero W and DAC+ Zero

Dear HifiBerry community,

Last week I received my HifiBerry DAC+ Zero for my Raspberry pi Zero W and soldered the connectors to the raspberry in the weekend. When I was finished with setting up my headless boot disk with BalenaSound I managed to use the Dac and Pi Zero nearly immediately, however this was only in a testing environment and thus I shut down everything properly and moved it to my workplace in the attic. However, since then I couldn't manage to create a working setup anymore while I've tried quite some different settings:

First I reinstalled BalenaSound again with a new image (containing wireless information for the router in the attic), this ultimately didn't provide me with any sounds.
Second, I tried installing Volumio several times, the installation went well however I still got no sounds coming out of my speakers when I set up the sound settings correctly for my Pi Zero and Dac. After which I checked my solders and reinforced some of those the day after as some of those were a little weak
Third, I tried to configure the settings in the "regular" Raspbian Lite OS and run the scripts for the test configuration, however still without results/sounds.
Last, I tried installing the HiFiBerry OS, however it didn't provide me any successes. Currently it is still running HiFiBerry OS and it receives all the data it is supposed to and i checked the aplay-1 command which delivered the following result:

# aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: sndrpihifiberry [snd_rpi_hifiberry_dac], device 0: HifiBerry DAC HiFi pcm5102a-hifi-0 [HifiBerry DAC HiFi pcm5102a-hifi-0]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

My question is, how do I get my system finally running and how do I make sure which part is malfunctioning?

I want to use it as a wireless AirPlay/Spotify receiver for my old IPod speaker which still functions perfectly, so to me the interface doesn't really matter as long as it provides a decent sound quality and is relatively easy to configure.

Thanks in advance,

Alain

HiFiBerry team November 25, 2020 19:28

In our experience, bad solder connections on the Pi's header are usually the root cause for this. However, there is no easy way to detect it. There is no way to check these in software.

Alain Groeneveld November 27, 2020 14:19

Hi Team, thanks for your quick reply!

I've improved my solderings and it now (finally) works as expected! Somehow the audio seems still quite buggy/laggy whenever I try to stream Spotify or regular music from my iPhone (using AirPlay) to the receiver while there are no issues whatsoever when I try to use Spotifyconnect on my laptop. I shall try to replace the software with other applications since I saw that the Pi Zero isn't completely supported by HiFiBerry OS (yet) due to the limited hardware of the Pi.

Thanks for your help once again and have a nice weekend!

Edit: the system works great now that I installed Volumio, my weekend starts great this way :-)

Edited by Alain Groeneveld November 27, 2020 16:19

No sound playing on Pi Zero W and DAC+ Zero

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