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DAC+DSP Stutter at Low Volume

Markus Schmitt

March 19, 2021 17:04

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Hey there,

I recently set up a Raspberry 4b with a DAC+DSP HAT. I use a  piCorePlayer-6.1-Installation (Squeezelite + LMS) on the Pi to stream music and connected the RCA-Output to my receiver / integrated amp. Everything is working so far and I'm quite happy with it. But after a few days I recognised, that the music is stuttering at low volume. So everytime there is a short pause or the music turns to extremely low volume for a split second, the music actually "stops" and "starts" again, which results in an audible "music start delay" or "stutter".

I hope you understand what I mean. It almost seems like the output-current is too low to drive the amplifier. But I also can see the green light on the board turn off and on again, everytime the music stops and starts. So i'm pretty sure, the board stops working for a split second. But I can't find a way to avoid this. 

Have you ever heard of similar issues? Any ideas where I should start searching? I would really appreciate some advice.

Thanks in advance and best regards,

Markus

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4 comments

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  Markus Schmitt March 30, 2021 07:31

  Are there no ideas on this topic? I have to set volume to 100% fix in LMS to get around this and therefore do the volume control on my receiver, which is kind of annoying. 

• 0
  
  HiFiBerry team March 30, 2021 11:45

  This is a normal behavior of the DSP profile that turns off the output of no sound is detected. You could use the no-automute profile from here:
  https://github.com/hifiberry/hifiberry-dsp/blob/master/sample_files/xml/dspdac-noautomute.xml

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  Markus Schmitt March 30, 2021 16:41

  Thank you very much. I will try that.

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  Markus Schmitt April 04, 2021 08:19

  Hi, thanks again. It worked! Now that I know what I was looking for, I actually found the answer already posted in the forum. But for anyone who is having the same issues as I did, here's what I did:

  - change piCorePlayer-SDcard to Raspberry Pi OS (Raspbian) SD card, because piCorePlayer doesnt support pip out of the box
  - you may want to establish ssh connection (because picoreplayer setup typically doesn't include monitor and keyboard)
  - make sure, python 3 and pip are installed and enable SPI
  - install dsp toolkit
  - download the noautomute-xml-file and move it to your Pi (i used the scp-command for that)
  - load profile to eeprom with dsptoolkit install-profile
  - switch back to piCorePlayer-SDcard
  - I had to restart piCorePlayer twice because at the first start squeezelite wasn't running

  Best regards and enjoy your listening
  Markus