Volumio Player Part 6

Well after all the fiddling I had two dissapointments, firstly on Play / Pause or track change there is an almighty 'crack' and when muted there is a background ticking noise.

I had read on the Adafruit website that to avoid the 'popping' when playback starts or stops then a) it's down to a Raspbian Linux thing, b) sorted by outputing a fixed sample rate to the I2S device so the bit clock does not change.

I tried messing around with the 'Audio Resampling' settings but this made no difference and I had seen on the Volumio website other people having the same problem with various DACs so as I had a generic I2S 5102A DAC knocking aroud (cheap and cheerful from China) :

I thought lets hook this up with some powered speakers and have a play (connections are as below):

VCC --> Not Connected

3.3V --> 3.3V

GND --> GND

FLT --> GND

DMP --> GND

SCL --> GND

BCK --> PIN 12 ( GPIO 18 )

DIN --> PIN 40 ( GPIO 21 )

LCK --> PIN 35 ( GPIO 19 )

FMT --> GND

XMT --> 3.3V

OK so that worked, but still noise etc. Now I have tin ears and my MP3 collection has file encoding of masssively varying quality so I set the DAC type to 'Generic I2S DAC' and then set the 'Audio Resampling' as below:

The result, no pops when starting play from paused, no pops when changing tracks, no ticking noise when muted.

I didn't really want to have to either keep recharging or supplying power to the speakers, so time for an amplifier. Remember the original idea, I wanted a small player that had it's own amplifier and speakers that could sit on the desk / shelf next to me whilst I work.

Enter the PAM8403 Amplifier board.

It's a Class D, 3W per channel amp (into 4 ohm speakers, it drops to 1.8W with 8 ohm speakers) that runs from 5V. Oh yes and it cost 40p, a quick hook up later with some old speakers from a defunct HiFi unit, fire up Volumio and...it's too loud even with the volume level down at 1.

Not wanting to end up over driving the amp I had a fiddle round with some resistor values and ended up using a 6k8 and 3k2 divider as so:

That give a just audible output at a volume setting of one.

So next thing to do is draw up the connections and post it up here, then build a case.