Hacker News Reader

Comment by yardie | Hacker News Reader

I was using my pi as an airplay receiver for my hi-fi. I'm not sure if they fixed it yet but the analog out was pretty bad (8kHz mono at the tome) but I know the audio quality could be better. So I stopped that then played Minecraft, now I use it to SSH into my house and WOL my ESXi servers, get the ipmi data from the servers and some simple Node stuff.

This is the Pi B v1 (256MB) I'm thinking about getting a v2 now.

View on HN

I have a Pi B v1 and it's analogue out is definitely stereo. The problem I had (which is persistent right across their range of boards) is the popping sound that happens at the start of audio because of the voltage change on the chip. There's been some workarounds to try and reduce the severity of the popping (namely building a fast volume change at the start of clips and using an "always on" sound server like Pulse. But annoyingly the only real fix seems to be to using a cheap USB audio adapter. So I've now come to the conclusion that the Raspberry Pi isn't the best development board for audio projects. However for $35, I have no regrets in buying one (in fact I still bought a 2nd one even after learning about the aforementioned issues).

Not of a great help for audio projects but Raspbmc has fixed that popping sound issue in quite a transparent way.

You can't "fix" the popping sound issue in software as it's a hardware issue. What Raspbmc does is use is the PulseAudio workaround that I'd described in my previous post.

I understand, I just wanted to point out it was transparent to the user.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com