AES/EBU Music Streamer

[edform]

I am a complete novice in the Raspberry Pi world, although I have many years of experience in the audio industry. I could do with some tips for setting up a music streaming system.

The rest of my equipment consists of a DSP speaker management controller driving a 6-channel Rotel amplifier and self-built 3-way speakers.

In order to eliminate the ADC frontend in my DSP speaker controller, I want to connect the music source to the AES/EBU input and I think this can be done with appropriate streamer software controlling a combination of a Raspberry Pi and something like the AUDIOPHONICS Digipi-AES TOSLINK TCXO Digital Interface AES/ EBU [ https://www.audiophonics.fr/en/dac-and- ... 13316.html ].

Can anyone offer advice on how to implement such a system?

Ed Form

[6by9]

Aes/ebu, and s/pdif (via either coax or toslink optical) are near identical in protocol, with only a couple of bits being used differently for status information. There's no real gain with using one over the other, and I would have expected your amp to have had more s/pdif inputs. There are also a few more options with regard s/pdif interface boards.

Software wise your board manufacturer should be able to advise. There are drivers for the most common i2s to s/pdif chips included in the standard pi kernels, so you'll want a suitable dtoverlay= line in config.txt to load the driver. It'll then show as a standard alsa device that you can play music to.
There are a number of choices of software for music streaming. Which to use is generally down to personal opinion.