Eddie Sinnott from Wolfson MicroElectronics just announced Wolfson Pi Audio Card, a little board that gets me excited about its capabilities:

https://twitter.com/eddie_wolfson/status/396253349927866369
https://twitter.com/eddie_wolfson/status/396280873412071424

DIY and other audio enthusiasts might also like to build build stuff and play with it.

Why is this audio extension to the Raspberry Pi special?
As stated by Eddie, the main codec powering this board is WM own WM5102 Audio Hub.
http://www.wolfsonmicro.com/products/audio_hubs/WM5102/ plus what's necessary for SPDIF intput and output and more

WM5102 key features for me:
– 113dB SNR to Headphone out (DAC+amp)
– Headphone driver evolved from WM8994/WM1811 codecs as used in Voodoo Sound but with much lower hiss levels

The addition of SPDIF input means you can use it as standalone DAC.

But as it will be plugged on the Pi, it transforms it in a high quality 192kHz/24bit capable player on analog output with a lovely sounding headphone amp, gives it a standard SPDIF output without relying on HDMI, and also recorder for SPDIF and analog inputs.

I already have a head full of network audio rendering capabilities ^^
My first goal with this would probably be to:
– install pulseaudio on the Pi
– output everything from my computers here
– then plug my headphones here to finally have a DAC+Amp that sound good to drive my various headphones (especially the HD650) when I'm not using speakers.

Among other things 🙂

I'll see how it fares with some simple measurements and listening tests but I already expect higher sound quality than the typical over-hyped DACs+HP amp promising so much, being praised to no end and delivering so little in reality.
Also this WM5102 is present in Galaxy S4 I9500 but Samsung made several implementation errors preventing the phone to reach quality levels WolfosonMicro audio hub is capable of.
So this would also be a bit like a dev board to play with to no end and with very little limitations. Lovely!

http://www.element14.com/community/community/raspberry-pi/raspberry-pi-accessories/wolfson_pi?ICID=hp-wolfsonpi-ban

I guess we'll need to wait a little bit to know more about price.

#supercurioBlog #audio



Community: Wolfson Pi Audio Card | element14
The Wolfson Pi Audio Card produced in partnership with Wolfson, the premier audio solutions chip company, offers Raspberry Pi users similar flexibility to a PC soundcard to capture audio alongside their camera, and experiment with stereo digital capture and playback.

Source post on Google+

Published by

François Simond

Mobile engineer & analyst specialized in, display, camera color calibration, audio tuning

8 thoughts on “Eddie Sinnott from Wolfson MicroElectronics just announced Wolfson Pi Audio Card, a little board that gets me excited about its capabilities:”

  1. +Aliyu Abba a quick listening test indicates 44.1 to 48k upsampling is less bad in Samsung 4.3 than it was on 4.2.2.
    It's too bad 4.4 KitKat doesn't support 24bit audio yet as all current hardware audio solutions are capable of that already.

    In the meantime I'm very happy WolfsonMicro decides to release their very low power designed initially for smartphones in other formats like this one. Associated to the Pi, that's genius.

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