Beautiful workmanship on that little cube!
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Thanks!
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Just a little bit of detail as to how much discussion went into the buildā¦ in order to make sure there was no restriction to the flow; the area of the air intake holes at the base is equal to the area of the vent holes at the top.
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@oberon is the central body machined as a single piece or was a cast piece that existed?
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Much cheaper this way and given the construction, Iād say probably extruded and then blasted rather than cast, but Iām not expert.
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Thanks I was just wondering if he machined that piece from a block, because it would well beyond anything Iād attempt, youād need a long endmill, and rigidity of everything then becomes an issue. Before you get into how long it would take on anything short of a VMC.
But it being an existing part makes a lot of sense.
Iād say probably extruded - makes sense given the size.
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Yup, itās an extrusion. It has nice thick walls so it was easy to machine. I could pocket that out out of billet but it would not be cheap.
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Built several streamers on Ian Canadaās components, highly recommended (just follow Gabster on YT)!
Only drawback I always tell people: get confident with good OS on your diy-streamer (huge difference and pain!!)
For beginners: volumio
For experts/digital nerds: gentooplayer is the way to go
Have fun!
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Oh nice build! I do like that shield pi hat, I feel it made more difference to my streamer build than any other single component.
That little cube is very stylish indeed.
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Curious about this after seeing Hans speak to it last week. Besides the config options did you indeed notice a sonic improvement?
Also can you check to see if the Pi2AES hat is supported? Iāve spent a couple of days poking around and canāt find a support list, thanks in advance!
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Hi, yes Iād say there is was hearable improvement on my Ian Canada full-stack!
Had used before Volumio, Moodel Audio, Snakeoil OS and Audiophile Linux.
WHY?
Because Fillipo (Gentooplayer) knows what he is doing in optimizing the Linux Kernel, he spent a lot of time on it. He also is close with the Italian dev-team behind the diretta protocol.
He has a ton of good optimized RT-Kernel option and neat web-frontend to tweak your settings for all kind of settings. Yes, you need to pay per device, but this is worth the money (ā¬69 per device).
I used various kernel-CLANG-LTO releases and RAM option, extremly good!
As Iām tired about those streaming-madness and I fully stopped it.
All I use from know is the Grimm Audio MU2 & Lumin Roon streaming.
ā¦and I host for free the Gentooplayer download mirror 
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Do you have a contact for Filipo?
Iāl like to know if his OS build support the Pi2AES hat.
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It will be supported, pretty sureā¦ ask him, he is very responsive.
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Might this possibly be one streamer to rule them all so i can get rid of all my streamers?
Possibly 6 custom built (one 240volt) and be consistent and done with this???
. I HATE how much streamers cost. I get really annoyed paying the premium for a basic computer. I would rather put the money in power
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Iāll take your Innuos Pulse off your hands when you swap it out for dBās magic mushroom Pi2AES 
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Iāve been thinking about buying a pi with Gentooplayer for a while, but the implementation puts me off a bit when I try to read up on it, I donāt understand 50-70% of whatās being said.
The hardware from IAN Canada turns me on.
So far Iām stuck with the PI4 with 8 GB, but Iāve read that the Pi2 is better for audio.
Is that true?
Pi 4 is better as the usb 3 ports are not controlled by the same chip as the network port. With the old 'Piās it was very difficult to avoid jitter/noise being passed between network and usb ports.
Once you start adding hats with power and galvanic separation such things are not as important.
Pi 4 with 8GB is probably the sweet spot at the moment, until the 5s are older and have as much hardware and software support.
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Thanks for the info.
As an actual blueprint, I originally thought of the following
Pi5 with 8GB, since it has a Pcie express interface I thought you could possibly plug in the Matrix Audio Element H, that would take care of part of the power supply directly.
As the Element H can also be powered sperately.
The real question is if it works and if drivers are necessary?
Probably still questionable what software is needed.
Only a PI nerd can probably answer this question.
It might be worth waiting.
With the Element H you donāt need a driver under Linux according to the instructions, only under windows.
I have also roughly read about the PI4, which is supposed to work a little better with the 5.
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I will say thought that if youāre not using USB you can turn with most software and the reason I went with the 3 B+ was that they use less processing and thus less noise. When choosing it was a toss us and certainly better if you were going to use USB to go the P4 route.
Iād stay away from the P5 for a good long while due to compatibility reasons on hats etc.
Theyāve made pretty good development in what the software does from when I started diddling around with them a few years ago. It seems like the Gentoo player is the way for optimum sound. Iāll probably fool around with it this weekend since Iāll be stag. Wife free for three whole days. Donāt know what Iāll do. Iām going to have to go out to get a cup of coffee.
@NickMimi you can connect your fancy twelve thousand dollar Ideon reclocker to the Pi2AES youāve got and see how much it improves it!
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I think we are in agreement 
Incidentally, for everyone interested in the Gentoo OS, you can achieve many/all of the optimizations in any Linux based system by installing the low latency kernels and performing additional setting tweaks. In general anything using the base ALSA sound stack is going to already be lower latency. Because Linux doesnāt use device drivers this is as close as you can get to direct control of a device. In other words there is the minimum possible software overhead. All the Linux audio OSs for Pi do this out of the box. Most distros offer a low latency kernel which will get you is performance boost measuring in fractions of seconds. For example
The kernel configuration Timer Frequency controls the frequency of the timer interrupt. By default, the kernel uses the value of HZ_250, which stands for 250 Hz. This means the timer interrupt happens 250 times spread evenly over a second-time slice.
To optimize the latency at the cost of throughput, we can change this configuration value to HZ_1000. With this change, the kernel will run the timer interrupt handling code once every 1/1000th second, which is four times as frequent as the default value. As a result, the kernel will perform context switching four times more in a given unit of time.
Obviously there is a cost. What you gain in processing speed you loose in flexibility. It needs to have more ram to offset this at the very least.
Many of the nix based streamer OSās make many of the same tweaks, the main difference I have been able to find with Gentooplayer is the kernel options. I could be wrong though so please correct me if so! Itās an interesting rabbit hole but it does feel a little bit hype-train given how much of this is just nix stuff. What Gentooplayer does do is make it easier to tweak a system out of the box, although if you donāt know what the tweaks are doing it could also make it easier to make it actually less optimised.
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