[HAL]

For years, have been very happy using an I2S Bus interface to DAC's like the original Audio Alchemy DDEV3 and Perpetual Technologies P3A DAC units.  Both had large sound improvements over the coaxial S/PDIF.

I have seen the PS Audio I2S Bus over HDMI, but that will not work with the older devices, and most modern DAC's have the original style I2S Bus interface on the chip. 

The Raspberry Pi style DAC HAT's use the I2S Bus interface on the GPIO to drive DAC's directly.  You use a dedicated music OS like Volumio or Moode to do the playback as the RPi4 has some dropout problems when running full Raspbian Buster OS as I have tried.  Not big on Linux, so time to try something else.

It is time to try this with a SBC that runs Windows 10 64bit OS and see what happens with I2S Bus as there are now GPIO available on some of them.  A few things need to be added, but that is very straight forward these days to have high quality audio.

With Windows 10 music players like Foobar2000, JRiver MC27 work well so those will be the starting points.  Both support things like room correction, headphone correction and room measurements.  Other programs like Room EQ Wizard will also run and can be used.  For recording from analog sources, Audacity has been very good as well.

Hardware is here for trials, so will post as testing begins in this thread.

[emailtim]

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With Windows 10 music players like Foobar2000, JRiver MC27 work well so those will be the starting points.  Both support things like room correction, headphone correction and room measurements.  Other programs like Room EQ Wizard will also run and can be used.  For recording from analog sources, Audacity has been very good as well.

Hardware is here for trials, so will post as testing begins in this thread.

Might want to check out CamillaDSP and add it to the list.  It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux and is being integrated into Moode.  It offers a convolution engine, IIR and FIR filters, XOs, delays, filter pipelines, accepts filters from Room EQ Wizard and Rephase and a variety of other features.  It runs underneath the player so it is not tied to a specific player.  It can also be used for streaming network endpoints.

https://github.com/HEnquist/camilladsp

[HAL]

Thanks for the info. 

This thread is about the I2S Bus audio interface in work for the HAL MS-6 for external DAC use.  The software installed is listed in the HAL MS-6 thread.

I have seen camilladsp and it can always be downloaded to the MS-6 running Windows 10 by the user.

I am working with the dspNexus 2x8 with 4 stereo DAC's, that will work as well for the filters described by camilladsp. 

 

[HAL]

The HAL MS-6 I2S Bus audio driver test setup for trying out the system.  This way I can debug the Windows 10 device driver software as I make progress.

[borism]

Hi,

I know this is an old thread but it's still of interest. I like my MS-6 and am interested in the I2S Bus interface because my DAC (Sonnet Morpheus) reportedly sounds better with it.

Any update on this experiment?

[HAL]

Hi borism,

Not yet. 

It is both a hardware and MS device driver solution for the I2S Bus interface. 

There are two different styles of I2S Bus interfaces, the older Audio Alchemy Mini-DIN style and newer HDMI style.  The only one I would try is the older style Mini-DIN as it should fit in the case with a connector.  It also needs logic voltage level translation for use with an external DAC to the CPU.  This would depend on which type of I2S Bus interface your DAC requires.

The second is writing a Windows 10 device driver for an Intel CPU for I2S Bus streaming.  That is the challenge! 

No timeframe at this point.