Measures 1.3.0 Beta 1 (Last test hopefully.

[uglymusic]

I suspect the difference is due to the time I have put into the NUC, e.g Bios and hardware tweaks, compared with Mercury which is my first Pi.  Note the difference is apparent only when comparing side by side.

What power source do you use with the Mercury?

Mercury, if you see this shoot me a DM (which you can't because this is a private section of the forum) . lol..

Both are powered by a Gieseler Kraftwerk II Dual power supply. 

Note that this small difference should not be the cause of alarm. Given that Intel no longer makes the NUC, with third parties taking over, I am more likely to go Pi 5 when the NUC gives up.  Hence the stumbling steps with the Pi now...

So, the PSU is around 10x the price of a Pi 5 (I'm not sure if Google is giving me US$ or AU$). Wow!

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While I have built a kernel, most people will not be able to do this.  Maybe the better long term OS & Kernel going forward for Pi is Bookworm and Ubuntu should be dropped for Pi ???

Pi only has Ubuntu and Bookworm. Dropping both will essentially drop Pi completely. That's not going to happen for now. Progress on Snakeoil is slow, but progress on Pi (hardware development) is even slower.

Pi 2 and 3 plainly sucks to be honest, with Pi 4 it's just getting better. And Pi 5 might be even better. Lack of a hardware clock is a downer, but on the other hand, a hardware clock is a potential for system noise. <- Ignore this theory because almost every audio hardware has a hardware clock so I'm just being silly.

Good thing with the Pi is the hardware is all the same (ignoring HATs).. If using a USB DAC (like I am going to do), the kernel I compile and use will be applicable to everybody else who uses a USB DAC. Same theory applies to the ZIMA board. Bottom line is a common hardware.

Unfortunately both hardware are kind of hard to buy at the moment. But maybe next year we'll get easier access.

Sorry if I'm repeating myself, but my experience is that RPi 3 and 4 sound very much the same via HATs (I don't have two of the same for A/B testing, if that's our kind of thing, nor do I have an RPi 2). Raw USB is so far behind any HAT I've tried that I never think of USB as an option. But I'd be tempted to see if any of the other options for digital output on the RPi 5 are worthwhile. 

Still apologising for my total lack of knowledge about the kernel and customising it; are you saying that each HAT needs its own variation on the kernel? I know I'm misunderstanding you because I have four different HATs running - two DACs and two SPDIFs - without kernel modification.

I feel a lot of Linux-related reading coming on.