Is there much difference in performance on different Pi's?

Pi MusicBox
1

Hi,
I have run musicbox on the A+ & B and don’t notice much difference in the performance.
Does anyone have any experience as to whether the Pi 2 is notably faster than the model B etc using musicbox??

While I’m at it - is the analog audio on the Pi 2 any better than the older models that suffered from crackles and pops ie do I still need a DAC?

2

Yes, the pi2 is noticeably snappier. It has the same analogue hardware as the older models. There was work done recently by the raspberry pi foundation to improve the onboard audio with a software fix, apparently noticeably improved. But I lost track of that effort so I don’t know when/if it’s going to be released.

3

Thanks for the info - i will five the Pi 2 a try with the analogue and compare to my B with Hifiberry DAC

4

Apparently the software fix is present but disabled by default in the latest raspbian, i.e. not present in musicbox v0. 6 since its way too old.

If you have the very latest raspbian (might need to do a rpi-update) you should be able to set audio_pwm_mode=2 in /boot/config.txt (and then reboot). You might still get distortion when setting the volume above 85% so don’t do that. And as always, if you are trying to drive headphones directly then you’ll probably find the volume too quiet; so in this case you’ll still want an amp.

5

And just to correct myself, it turns out the B+ does have a slightly different audio output compared to the B. It has a higher output level and lower output impedance.

I just tried audio_pwm_mode=2 and it is much improved.

6

Thanks kingosticks - interestingly i just tried on a raspberry pi A+ with the standard 0.6 image and don’t hear any pops or clicks. I’ll ultimately be plugging whichever Pi I use into a Logitech PC speaker systems (Z906) - do you have idea if the onboard DAC would clean up the sound from the Pi’s 3.5mm out at all? Not entirely familiar with how DACs and sound works in this case :wink: