Allo DigiOne

Product Information

Now, what I don’t like about this. I would have preferred to have a way to feed the DigiOne and the Pi separately. Allo claims there is no need (and they are probably right, considering the DC regulators and galvanic isolation) but I think this is anyway a Nice to have feature. To lower the noise of the USB, we had to lower noise on EACH rail. In total, USBridge Sig uses more than 30 LDOs. Even the SD card power rail has a dedicated LDO. There are zero switching elements on board. Of course, since this is based on RPI compute, we decided to include the standard RPI connector. Anything that works on an RPI will work on the USBridge Sig. For example, you can use a DigiOne / DigiOne Sig to make a full fledge streamer that outputs USB, BNC and coaxial.

But little precision. In digital world, SNR have no place (almost…). SNR is for analog part. Yes, you must have a good power supply, the only thing is to not have signal perturbation to high. I ever see lot of digital circuit running well with -6db of noise. In digital world this is binary : 1 or 0. To me, the DigiOne (or DigiOne Player, if you look for a complete player) are the best choice possible as of now if you own an S/PDIF DAC, or if you know for sure that the implementation of S/PDIF receiver in your DAC is superior than the USB side. So my conclusion is: the DigiOne is expensive when compared to similar solution, but it’s definitely worth every penny of it. What we have here is something that was not designed to sound good, but to sound as best as possible (on Raspberry PI), and this is not yet another case of over-engineering: they made clear design choices which my listening impressions confirm to be correct. A more essential A/B is how the Allo DigiOne-loaded Raspberry Pi compares to its Just Boom equivalent. Let’s not beat about the bush: the DigiOne is markedly better. It sounds smoother, richer, more easeful and offers a slightly taller and deeper soundstage than its less costly UK rival.Allo have designed a digital (S/PDIF) transport for Raspberry Pi audio with one goal in mind: Absolut best S/PDIF output.

I‘m sure there are much better streamers out there, able to improve massively on my set up - I don’t dispute that. Probably, though, I’m never going to get to hear them and even then, I would probably still opt to spend additional cash on other items of hi fi kit.Volumio still crashes (root filesystem or boot records get munged). Reminage the SD, and good to go. To do this pimping it uses two extra boards mounted on top of the bottom layer Pi, in a kind of sandwich. Already this language could have an entirely different connotation on a different part of the internet… Anyway, normally a Pi can be configured with a micro USB input for power and Ethernet input to get internet for music streaming services, and a USB output to your DAC. Its operating system comes not so much on a ‘wafer thin mint’ SD card type, but in miniature micro SD card guise. Choose the operating system you want and off you pop.

Nevertheless, I decided to free my mind from the above prejudice and use an analytical approach with the DigiOne. So, my first step was trying to understand why Allo released an S/PDIF transport that costs about 3 times than similar gear: I know them too better to think they are overpricing, or adding useless components to their boards, so I was curious to see the rationale behind their choice. We see identical performance from both, substantially lowering the jitter and noise products from Schiit Modi 2 Uber. What is left from prior testing, is due to deficiencies in the rest of the Modi 2 Uber DAC than anything to do with digital input jitter. You could just use a RPi as a headless network/audio endpoint rather than a full blown streamer with it's own app or web interface. Although that would require you to stream directly to it from a phone or laptop (via AirPlay / Bluetooth / DLNA / RAAT / Spotify Connect / LMS Squeezebox protocol etc.) or have some software running elsewhere ie. on a NAS, that you could do that job and that you could control remotely.Intona USB 2.0 Hi-Speed Isolator is the USB isolator that worked the best in my own system and if you’re set on using a USB connection, both this one and iFi regenerators are great options. However, neither can come close to DigiOne’s price to performance ratio.