After a long break, I’m back, but with some… well not positive information. I recently bought a JustBoom DAC Zero for a Raspberry Pi Zero W I bought some time ago and never came up with a project for. Read on.
You can see my hack-inspired monster on the left, and the rather nice-looking JustBoom DAC Zero on the right, sitting on top of a Raspberry Pi Zero W. Build quality of the JustBoom is quite nice, the price is attractive ($20), the feature set is nice too, it is a DAC and headphone amplifier all-in-one, saving me the cobbling I did on mine.
Now for the not so good.
I bought this DAC for the reasons explained above, I had a spare Pi Zero W (The last Raspberry Pi I will ever buy, barring a huge shift in their organization’s culture and hardware design). I wanted it to be a much cleaner version of the Frankenstein’s monster I had created before the introduction of the zero W. I wanted to do some cool stuff and write an awesome piece showing you how to make a portable pi player without any fuss or hacking. I did not, however, get what I wanted.
Setup: Perfectly fine, Volumio has this DAC in the list with all the others, no problems there.
Playback: Well. The music part of what I was hearing sounded quite good, clean, crisp, well balanced, etc etc etc. The problem was, the music wasn’t all I was hearing. There was a clicking, fizzing noise, you’ll recognize it immediately if you’ve put your cell phone next to a tube amplifier, or had a cheap set of amplified speakers and done the same. The WiFi on the Pi Zero W was creating audible disturbances in my music. Loud enough that the DAC I have is useless. On the older hacked player I created, you remember I literally glued an Edimax wifi dongle’s PCB to the DAC board itself, and I get none of the noise.
I can’t recommend this product, unless it is determined I have a somehow defective unit, one of it’s biggest features just plain doesn’t work.