Pi2 Design Idiot-Proof Ready-To-Go RPi/AES Streamer

Sorry, I'm running my Mercury from a pre-production unit of our forthcoming JS-4. A triple-regulated, dual isolated output, 2A/4A linear supply--in the same lovely Japanese chassis as our venerable high-current JS-2.

 

Just posted the first cut of the mercury V3 hardware reference manual on the website.

we also set up the purchasing to allow the customer to choose between the different OS that we support.

 

Does the Mercury v3 support piCorePlayer? If not, is this in the plans? Otherwise, is there a good way to use Mercury or other Pi 2 Design hardware as streamers within the Squeezebox/LMS (Logitech Media Server) ecosystem?

 

we can make picore player image. Send me an email with what you want. [email protected]

 

Thanks, Micheal. Email sent.

 

Just a quick post to let everybody know that mercury V3 is shipping. We've got a few issues still to work out on the documentation, as well as getting the various OS images the way we want. One item that cropped up was we originally were going to use a Micro SD card extender to bring the SD card from the raspberry pi socket to the back panel. Unfortunately, they proved to be less than reliable and we had to abandon that. The units shipping now you'll have to take the front panel off to replace the SD card if needed. We're going to make a simple Pcb that will extend it directly to the front panel and that will be very reliable. But that'll probably be another 3 to 4 weeks.

 

Congrats on getting Mercury V3 out the door Michael!

I want to let everyone know that there is now a beta Linux version of Aurdirvana and GentooPlayer (my favorite OS for Mercury) has added support:
https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/55235-gentooplayer/?do=findComment&comment=1277112

I have not yet tried it but plan to. The only downside is that headless, one needs to use one of Audirvana's iOS or Android Remote apps for control. There is not an Audirvana control client for computers.

I am also rather green when it comes to pointing GentooPlayer at SMB shared network drives. My music resides on one at my desktop and Roon makes it really easy to point (my separate low-power Roon Core Server AudioLinux/NUC) to those.

 

Audirvana for Linux is very very interesting. I have it running on a pi4 and on a pi5. I am using a 4TB usb SSD for boot and music on the pi5.

Oh and the iPad version of the remote app runs on the Mx series of Apple Macs.

Now to chase power supplies for this fun.

 

Oh! Well that's GREAT to know! My desktop machine--at my desk in my studio/office--is an M1 PowerBook and that's the machine I like to use for playback track selection/control and library management.

Now I just need to decide on which quiet, linear powered box I want to run Linux Aurdirvana on. I could either:

a) Audirvana (under probably GentooPlayer) on my ultra-low-power (less that 1A) diskless/fanless 2GHz Celeron NUC (which presently runs Roon Core Server) > 'A' side of EtherREGEN > Mercury V1 connected to EtherREGEN 'B' side, under GentooPlayer in RAM with MPD loaded as endpoint > I2S to my Holo Spring L3.

or
b) Install the Audirvana player engine directly on the GentooPlayer Mercury and completely set aside the NUC.

In either case I need to finally learn how to properly point GentooPlayer to SMB-shared music storage drives that reside at my desktop machine. Roon makes that so easy, avoiding the need for mucking with Linux.

Ideally I will try out both "a)" and "b)" above to see which sounds better.
I can say that running the MacOS version of Audirvana on my M1 laptop with the (GentooPlayer in RAM) Mercury receiving via MPD did not sound anywhere near as good as my above usual special NUC RoonCore > Mercury RoonBridge setup (and the comparison was done NOS with PCM and DSD64 to remove sample rate filter variance as a factor).

I guess that computing power might play a factor in it as well. But since the Mercury tops out at 192KHz and DSD64 there is only ever a modest load for upsampling--from Redbook 44.1KHz to 176.4KHz.

Would love to hear from anyone here who takes the plunge and starts to run Audirvana on their Mercury.