Poor quality audio on rPi A+

Hi,

I’m trying to iron out the last couple of issues with my Mopidy install and this is the biggest one. I cannot get decent audio quality out of my 3.5mm stereo jack. I’ve tried with different rPis and with different cables, so I know it’s not the hardware.

I’ve followed the instructions here, but the quality remains low. I hear “fuzzing” and “crackling”. I don’t know if this is related, but the volume also seems low to me. I have to crank my speakers right up, and even then it’s not very loud.

The only thing I haven’t done per the instructions above is:

Note that you might need to ensure that PulseAudio is no longer running to get this working nicely.

I don’t know how to do this. I tried googling but the instructions did not appear relevant to Raspbian.

Any ideas how I can rectify this?

Thanks

Pulseaudio is not relevant for the raspberry pi. Can you confirm you are
running a recent-ish version of raspbian? Are you trying to overclock? Are
you confident your power supply is solid? Have you tried running musicbox?
If you try that, with all its pre-configured tweaks, and are still unhappy
with the audio quality then you’ll have to think about using one of the rpi
external soundcards. I’ve not tried a default raspbian installation and 3.5
jack audio output in a long time so I’m not sure what the exact status is.
It used to be reasonable so I’d be very surprised if there had been a
regression.

Thanks for the reply.

I’m running the most recent Raspbian with all updates applied. Am also running latest rPi firmware (via rpi-update).

To double-check the power supply, I swapped from my A+ with Wifi to my B+ with nothing but power, Ethernet, and headphones plugged in. Same result - crackly, low volume audio.

I will try running Musicbox when I get a chance this week. I can only assume there has been a regression at this point, but then this is the first time I’ve run mopidy so I don’t have a basis for comparison.

Cheers

I’m using an A+ with PiMusicBox (0,53), and the audio out of the stereo jack is normal. Okay, it has the problems that are only avoidable with a DAC (such as ocational small pops when initiating play and so on). But nothing like the problems you mention. Of course, this setup differs from yours, the OS and firmware on the standard PiMusicBox are not the lastest ones.

Just FYI, I ended up purchasing a Pi-DAC+, and it has solved both problems (poor quality and lack of volume).