What is it?

BOSS is a Master DAC for Rasberry Pi. It's compatible with Rasberry Pi 2 and 3 and has a dedicated 384 kHz/32bit high-quality DAC PCM5122 for best sound quality.

Can be used with

• OSMC
• Max2Play
• RuneAudio
• Volumio
• Moode
• PiCorePlayer
• PiMusicBox
• OpenELEC
• and others + Roon Ready

Why did you make it?

The Rasberry Pi has one major problem with audio. The clocks coming from CPU can only output one frequency clock perfect (very close), resulting in major problems with audio files sampled at 44Khz (and multiple). Too much jitter on i2s clocks. So we invented the Kali but there is a second way.

Enter the master mode for i2s. Instead of the Rasberry Pi giving the clock on the line, the DAC itself sends the clocks and Rasberry Pi sends the data (file to be played). Since we used 2 clocks the problem above disappears. Ours is not the first master DAC on the market, there are others... read on.

What makes it special?

Our BOSS DAC is unique, because of the way we have implemented the design. First, we separate the power on 3 channels and filter it: one for the digital side, the second for analog and third for the clocks themselves. Then we take the filtered power and use a second filter (LDOs) to further quiet the noise. Note that we use some of the best LDOs on the market (LT3042 from Linear). In addition, we use Japanese oscillators from NDK for a very low jitter clock - almost as good as famous Crystek. Finally, on the analog stage, we are using a film capacitor (not ceramic) for a quiet DC to feed the TI IC (ceramic exhibit some piezo distortion, not what you want in analog stage). Not happy with this, we have added a supercapacitor for an extra kick when analog stage is asking (like deep bass). What we have achieved, in our opinion, is the best analog implementation of the PCM5122 on the market, while at the same time correcting the clock problem from Rasberry Pi.