Using off board DAC (Arcam irDAC) with PiMusicBox

Pi MusicBox
1

Hi,

I want to use my Arcam irDAC with PiMusicBox on Raspberry Pi 3B, but can’t seem to get the Pi to output audio through USB.

I know the Pi is working OK with Spotify as I’ve managed to get sound through the 3.5 (headphone) Jack and via HDMI into the TV. That quality is not great. I want to output audio digitally via USB from the Pi to the Arcam DAC and let that do the conversion before it feeds on to my Arcam amp and ultimately my speakers.

I’ve tried setting the audio output to automatic, usb and analog. However, though the Arcam DAC recognises that something is connected and feeding a signal (its USB light turns green) no sound is forthcoming.

Am I missing something? Is the raspberry Pi not compatible with an asynchronous DAC?

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Tim

2

Usb dacs are mostly all the same. The driver support should be OK unless it’s something really exotic. You will want the USB setting. There’s a log at /var/log/musicbox_startup.log which would be helpful. You can also provide the output of aplay -l.

3

Thank you. I shall try that.

The DAC is not specifically a USB DAC. It has various inputs - Optical, Coaxial and USB type B and type A. I’m using the type A USB input.

Thanks again.

4

Quick update: I changed the output to aplay -l as suggested and I’ve managed to get the Pi streaming via a different USB DAC (Behringer UCA202) that I have.

Still no luck getting sound from Pi through the Arcam irDAC though. Perhaps the drivers don’t support this DAC.

Thanks for your help so far.

Tim