Extract audio from HDMI

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rogerayotte

Member
Joined 2023
#1
My recent upgrade from a Raspberry Pi 4 to a Pi 5 left me without a convenient audio out. So I thought I would get a HDMI audio extractor. We'll I did, and I am disappointed. I thought with this device I could replace my Windows 10 Dell all-in-one that I use only for streaming Pandora. I feed the PCs headphone out to my little 6BM8 tube amp and small near field speakers. I really dig the sound from this,but when I switched to the HDMI extractor the sound quality diminished.

The device I bought is supposed to handle 4k at 60Hz, so I thought it would do a good job. Anyone have experience with extracting audio from the HDMI output? I know it's not ideal, but really, should there be that much difference between these two ways of playing audio from say Pandora?

Thanks in advance,
Roger
 
#4
rogerayotte said:
My recent upgrade from a Raspberry Pi 4 to a Pi 5 left me without a convenient audio out. So I thought I would get a HDMI audio extractor. We'll I did, and I am disappointed. I thought with this device I could replace my Windows 10 Dell all-in-one that I use only for streaming Pandora. I feed the PCs headphone out to my little 6BM8 tube amp and small near field speakers. I really dig the sound from this,but when I switched to the HDMI extractor the sound quality diminished.

The device I bought is supposed to handle 4k at 60Hz, so I thought it would do a good job. Anyone have experience with extracting audio from the HDMI output? I know it's not ideal, but really, should there be that much difference between these two ways of playing audio from say Pandora?

Thanks in advance,
Roger
Click to expand...
Not for myself, but for a friend, i did the same thing.
adason

Thread 'Audio from HDMI cable'

Friends, i have few questions about hdmi cable.
My friend is trying to get analog audio out of his soundbar, which has only hdmi out.

Is this enough? Hdmi to rca. However, it has bad reviews as its mostly not working right.

This is just cable, no power. Does that mean hdmi cable has analog audio signals already there (like white and red cable) or is it digital audio? Like for multichannel dolby? Or both?

Can i just cut one end of hdmi cable, find those analog left and right wires and solder rca there? Not trying to save few bucks, he can just order the hdmi to rca cable.
 
#5
Pandora provides compressed signal, which may sound ok on mediocre setup, but my digitized files shows it has severe lack of transients. They squished the peaks.
adason

Thread 'Pandora compressed?'

Hi all, i have recorded some pandora favourite artists on cassette deck for my background listening in garage in the past. Sounds as good as the media offers. Now i wanted to improve the quality, i started recording digitaly. I am using soundblaster ADC external soundcard and sony soundforge software. Just like i have been doing with lp's or rtr. Done lots of digitizing, so i am quite familiar with levels setup.
No matter what i do, i see signal from pandora compressed, like all the peaks were squished.
No matter what headphone output signal, no matter what record level input signal.
I...
 
#6
Thanks all for the feedback. What I discovered was that I was running the HDMI audio extractor at full volume. This likely diminished the overall quality. The sensitivity of the 6BM8 amp is sufficient that I can reduce the volume out of the extractor and now, sweet happiness!

Roger
 
#8
yulen said:
Have you considered using HDMI to AES/EBU?
Click to expand...
HDMI, AES3, coaxial/optical S/PDIF, direct I2S, USB - this is not just an issue of digital audio protocol, there's also the situation that rogerayotte's HDMI extractor converts the digital audio to analogue output. How good would we expect the DAC circuitry inside an HDMI extractor to be?

phofman said:
Did you consider e.g. some inexpensive USB soundcard instead of extracting audio from HDMI?
Click to expand...
This.

rogerayotte said:
sweet happiness!
Click to expand...
There are different levels of sweet happiness. If you have a good hifi system you owe it to yourself to get some form of half decent DAC.
 
#12
There are hundreds of solution, I just listed an easy example to avoid using hdmi audio extractor.

And fyi, the hifiberry solution is i2s, and you can easily separate the hat, shield, isolate as needed to get that last 10% of goodness just like Ian has done. (Or like Bryston’s hifiberry solution)
 
#13
My issue with a HAT right now is that I have an ssd connected to the bottom of the Pi, and the case that accommodates that has no room for a HAT. Cases with room for a HAT don't accommodate the under mounted ssd. I will likely abandon this case/ssd mount and get a case that will allow for multiple HATs etc.

ThANKS,

Roger
 
#14
The new raspberry pi compute module 4/5 solves a lot of issues for me.

1737907849451.png


I have a few cm4 with audio hats and just ordered a cm5 with hopes I can find a compatible gen3 nvme that has 4tb of storage to serve files.

There are all sorts of CM4 IO boards with different features that you might check out.

The compute modules run cooler and the WiFi/Bluetooth is an option along with eMMC storage if you don’t want to use nvme.
 
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