HiLetgo PCM5102 I2S IIS Lossless Digital Audio DAC Decoder Module Stereo DAC Digital-to-Analog Converter Voice Module for Arduino Raspberry Pi

I wanted a high-quality method of streaming audio from Spotify and my music collection to a new set of powered speakers and subwoofer in the family room. I decided to use a spare Raspberry Pi running the open source Volumio streamer software. Originally, I had a USB DAC (digital to analog converter) attached, but wanted something more compact and potentially higher quality.I found this cheap $8.00 DAC module that uses an older, but very capable Burr Brown PCM5102A chip. Far cheaper than a Hifiberry, if you can do a bit of soldering of the included 6-pin header to the board.. It interfaces with the Pi over a I2S digital audio interface, connected to the Pi via six jumpers to the expansion port pins. Volumio takes care of the driver setup. It sound pretty fantastic compared to the USB DAC. The only downside is that the PCM5102 does not support internal digital volume control, so Volumio needs to scale the digital audio before passing to the DAC with a slight loss of resolution and SNR. Unnoticeable with the powered speakers and ambient noise environment and not a practical issue unless you are an audiophile perfectionist.Instructions for connection are easy to find online. The default solder-bridged options on the back side are pre-configured for perfect Pi operation. Be sure to ground the "unused" SCK pin or you will get distorted or no audio output. You can also put a solder blob across the two pads near the SCK pin to permanently ground it and save one jumper wire to the Pi. Use the "HiFiBerry DAC" device in the Volumio device options for the correct driver.

All 6 pins will need to connect to pi in order to get decent sound. Use an available gnd pin on the pi to connect to sclk. Pcm5102 made by burr brown and Texas instruments is a high quality chip, and should produce high quality audio. You can also configure your driver's by borrowing phat dac 1 line installer. This will configure Raspbian is for you in a jif.

There are 4 jumpers on the back and 1 on the front, and No documentation to tell you which ones should be Soldered. In my case, All 5 were unsoldered, and the board was unusable.If you head over to the Raspberry Pi StackExchange, and search for a question titled "How to make PCM5102 DAC work on Raspberry Pi ZeroW?" and look for the answer by the contributor named "riban", you'll find an explanation for the jumpers. In my case I was using the 3 wire I2S protocol, so I soldered the jumper on the front (which arrived incompletely soldered), and soldered the Jumpers according to riban's stackexchange answer, and everything worked great. If they had labeled the jumpers on the back "FLT", "DEMP", "XSMT", and "FMT" instead of 1,2,3, and 4 to be consistent with the datasheet, (which you can find by searching for PCM5102, by the way) it would have saved me 4 hours of debugging trying to figure out how to use this unit.

I put the little board into my Midi DIY project which interfaced with a Raspberry Pi 4b. Just a simple three wire connection and driver software that's built into Bullseye OS Raspberry Pi Os. Dead silence.I order the same board from a different company and compared the boards. The one from HiLetGo had smaller components and the DAC chip was smaller. I could not get this board to do anything. The new ones worked as promised. Come on hiletgo I know you sell decent products.

Simple to use - no instructions but a quick search found everything needed to connect to I2S on the Pi. Note whatever software you are using (or writing) needs to support I2S audio but that is fairly common.

If a chip is popular, everyone makes a breakout board for it. You get your choice of color schemes: red for SparkFun, Blue for Adafruit, some green ones (Seeed?) but none are as awesome as these purple ones.Put it under magnification and the soldering is OK, there are no skewed parts, construction is OK.Did I mention it's purple?

Used with an ESP32 project, sounds great, no notable noise. Would recommend.

Sound quality is good but the presentation of the product is not good and that my reason to give 3 stars1.product came without instructions2.product came with the pin headers but you have to cut to get the desired size3.I will save hours of troubleshooting with this point the product don’t came jumpered in the back part of the pcb you need to add the jumper to get it workingSee the product image on the back of pcbI guess these little details can be improvement