PiRistona SA5026A

PiRistona SA5026A
Participants	Dennis
Skills	Linux
Status	Active
Niche	Music
Purpose
Tool	No
Location	Niz
Cost
Tool category

PiRistona SA5026A

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What

I've acquired a beautiful antique Aristona SA5026A. Plan is to make a nice music player out of it using a Raspberry Pi B+ and a Suptronics X400 AMP/DAC HAT. I cut all existing wires going to the speakers and soldered some new wire to the the right and left speakers, and this wire connects to the Suptronics hat. The front speaker is not connected for now. Sound quality isn't great, but for now it'll do. The Pi with its hat sits in a cardboard box inside the Aristona case.

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  Internals as I found them

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  Closeup

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  Original wiring of the front speaker

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  Pi in place in cardboard box, wires going to left and right speakers

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  Pi sneaking a peak out of the box

Power consumption

Measured power consumption with cheap crappy meter on the wall outlet end, so measured values are power brick + pi + AMP/DAC + speakers. Weird, it consumes about 5 Watts when AMP is turned on, and it doesn't matter if and how loud music is playing (I did not go very loud yet, will do that during daytime). With AMP off (jumper on) it consumes about 3.5 Watts. Jumpers on mute or head phone headers do not make a difference in power consumption.

Volume control

There is a knob on the X400, and volume can be set from within Volumio. The two seem to work independently. I seem to get less noise when the knob is turned low and volume in Volumio is turned up, than the other way around.

Software

I'm running OSMC at the moment. Some notes this and on other audio player distros that I tried are below.

OSMC

Got DAC working, needed following lines in /boot/config.txt:

dtparam=i2s=on
dtoverlay=iqaudio-dacplus
dtparam=audio=off

After a reboot I could select this as default audio output in OSMC \o. Kodi is kind of heavy on the CPU, so I might want to do some tweaks or go with another solution after all.

Volumio

Tried volumio-2.246-2017-07-31-pi.img. After first boot you should wait while a lot of stuff is happening, like partition resizing. If you reboot it to soon you'll end up with a non working system. Got DAC working from within the WebUI:

• Go to Menu
• Choose Playback Opions
• Enable I2S DAC
• Choose IQaudIO Pi-DigiAMP+
• Save and reboot

I remember having to dive in using SSH to fix the Youtube plugin. It recently broke again after updating through the webGUI, so I probably want to fix it again and document how.

Rune Audio

Tried v0.3-beta (29/10/2014), could not get it stable. It consistently threw kernel panics when rebooting, and the WebUI kept crashing.

Todo

• Switch AMP on/off from the Pi to save 1.5W when not playing music.
• Decide if existing speakers need replacing for better sound.
• Find out how to connect the front speaker
• Think about controls, possibly using existing buttons and knobs on the front panel
• LEDs?
• Display?