The simplest way to stream music from a Raspberry PI to an external amplifier is to connect the headphone jack to the AUX Input of the amplifier with the help of a corresponding connector cable. From a quality point of view a better approach is to use an external Digital to Analog Converter (DAC)  connected to the I2S pins of the Raspberry PI and for a PI Zero this is the only way because it does not have a phone jack.

Today I received my USD $5.33 I2S DAC from AliExpress. I did not expect that this is arriving so quickly: It took less then 2 weeks to have it shipped from China to Switzerland – and this in spite of all the problems with Corona !

Naturally I wanted to test it and the easiest I figured, might be to connect it to a Raspberry PI. Unfortunately this seems to be quite tricky with Raspian, so I installed the Volumio Music Player Operating System. In the configuration I just selected the Generic I2S as output.

I was struggling a bit with the Raspberry PI Pinout:

Here are the connections on the Board:

I connected the 2 Devices as follows:

  • VCC  – 5V Power
  • GND – Ground
  • GND
  • LRCK – BCM 19 (FS)
  • DATA – BCM 21 (DOUT)
  • BCK – GPIO 16 (CLK)

The 2 Cinch Connectors went to the Aux Input of my Amplifier and all was good!


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