PCM5102 PCM5102A AUX Stereo Digital Audio DAC Decoder Board Module Voice Module Player Module Digital-to-Analog Converter IIS I2S for Arduino Raspberry Pi (3PCS)

READ THIS BEFORE YOU SOLDER THIS ONTO YOUR PROJECT!!!! I bought this for an MT32-Pi project I was building. The first one didn't produce any sound, so I removed it and soldered another. After talking with some others in the retro computing/maker community near me, they told me the quality is hit or miss. After some time had passed, I was looking at another project that uses these. It noted the BACK side needs to have specific pads soldered/jumpered. I checked mine, NONE of them were set. One quick desolder off the MT32-Pi's PCB, connecting the appropriate pads, and resoldering it back, it NOW WORKS PERFECTLY. Check the attached image and make sure you short/solder these pads as shown so you don't end up like me. When it's jumpered/working properly, there is a red LED on the DAC itself showing it's initialized/active.

I got this to build a DIY bluetooth speaker with an ESP32, it works wonderfully. The sound quality is better than I expected. It will easily drive headphones or the line-in on an amplified speaker.

It worked for me with basic sound from a FPGA though I am not an audiophile and can't comment much about the sound quality except that it's good enough for me. Some technical info follows. The is marked as Burr-Brown PCM5102A. The four jumpers 1, 2, 3, 4, at the bottom allows to connect FLT, DEMP, XSMT and FMT, to ground or vdd,. These four signals are also connected to the pads 1, 2, 3, 4, an the default is L, L, H, L. The four digital inputs SCK, BCK, DIN, and LCK, are connected via 220 ohm serial resistors to the IC, and the solder jumper new the SCK pad can be shorted if you don't use SCK (that's what I did, using the IC's PLL). There are two +3.3V LDOs that are fed from the VIN pad. One goes to AVDD and the other goes to CPVDD and DVDD. If you connect VIN to 3.3V they are almost like shorts and pass on the 3.3V. I connected VIN to 5V to have actual regulation and noise filtering on the board. The digital input are still at 0-3.3V level due to the DVDD regulator. The two outputs (on the jack and on the L and R pads) are connected through 470 ohms resistors. I replaced them with 1.5K to reduce the sound level with the headset I use (35 ohms per side). Overall it's a well designed board and I am happy with it.

I purchased these for my Raspberry Pi's. Very easy to connect and come with wire for hookup. DOES require 5v to work properly. Sound quality good and they appear well built. Great for those DIY projects that require sound using SPI connection. You can plug in earphones or wire it to larger jack's..

Worked well for the Pi Synth project it was purchased for. (MT-32 Pi) No problems or concerns. Nice that it came with a few hookup wires instead of pre installed headers for flexibility

I hooked one of these up to a Raspberry Pi Zero to make a music server. It worked fine, and the audio quality was fine.

If you don't expect too much flexibility, this PCB will do ok as a DAC. However, if you want to use headers and fit it to any standard (2.54 mm) hole-size breadboard or prototyping board, you'll quickly find that the designers made a big layout mistake and the vertical and horizontal pin arrangements don't fit! Crazy mistake. You can either line up the 6 pins on the narrow edge of the board, or the 9 pins on the long edge, *but not both*. Also the FLT pin is supposed to be able to connect to either VDC or ground to select one of the PCM5102's two filter modes. But on this board, the pin is permanently tied to ground, rendering it useless. I asked the vendor's support about this and they didn't know how to fix it. (There is no trace to cut). There are other PCM5102 boards out there without these two core mistakes, I'd suggest you look at those alternates.

I support a small dance school as their techie and they had been wrestling with a constant fallout of AUX cables to feed the music systems in the classrooms. They were going through two to four 1/8" AUX to RCA cables/iPhone to AUX cables per month. Cheap or expensive cables really didn't matter, except for how much it cost for the month. These boards plus an ESP32 plus a wall wart cost less than the monthly budget for disposable AUX cables. I hooked one of these up to one of the stereos and they never looked back. They asked for one in each room within the first two weeks. They've been using these for nearly a year now, and at worst, they've had to power cycle them, which is nearly instantaneous.

Three of them for similar price to one, so was skeptical of quality, but wired it up and worked first try. Definitely would recommend.