 When Audiophonics offered me a RaspTouch for review, I accepted, for I had just spoken to someone that didn't want Wi-Fi to pollute his house so he couldn't use an affordable streamer since they all need a tablet or smartphone to select the music. Enter the RaspTouch. Audiophonics is a French company that offers loads of DIY electronics components and ready-to-use audio products. They are rather active designing components for building Raspberry Pi based streamers like the headboard DA converters, SPD boards, housings and power supplies including linear types. They also offer ready-to-use streamers based on combinations of these products. This review initially was about the special housing holding the 7-inch Raspberry Pi touchscreen but since they included their new ES9028DA converter for the Raspberry Pi, it is a review of this board too. But it is good to realise that you could use the same housing and Raspberry Pi and combine it with a cheaper DAC or with an SPDIF output board. You could even just order the housing and screen to combine with the components you already own. But in this review I will judge the ready-to-use product as supplied by Audiophonics. The RaspTouch housing holds the 7-inch color display under an angle so it can be operated easily. Further back on the top of the housing is a smaller display that shows the status of the DAC board. Sample rate, volume setting and input. The letter will display IIS indicating the I2S input from the Raspberry Pi. Press the volume knob down and the SPDIF input on the rear is selected. Ideal for routing the TV sound over your stereo. To the right of this small screen is the rotary encoder that operates the digital volume control that is integrated in the DAC chip. Unfortunately it doesn't listen to the volume control slider on the front which is handled by the processor of the Pi Core player. The rear holds the standard Raspberry Pi connections, four USB 2 ports and a network connector. Furthermore a stereo analog output plus the SPDIF input, an HDMI output that is not active with this software installation and a power supply input. There also is a microSD card slot that holds the operating system. It is the first time I see the microSD card slot being shifted to the exterior. For you DIYers, the socket plus flexible print to hook up to the microSD card slot of the PCB is also available separately. On the right side a power button is located that controls the APX kind of board that does decent powering down to prevent file damage on the microSD. Just like normal computers now do. As can be concluded from the name, the DAC board uses an ESS ES9028 Q2M DAC chip that uses the hyper stream architecture and time domain jitter eliminator. These are of course trade names but they really stand for something. The DAC uses an oversampling filter followed by an asynchronous sample rate converter. It can handle PCM up to 32 bit 768 kHz and DSD128 over DOP. Now let me say again, although this is a great DHIP, it is no guarantee for a good sound. Not only needs the PCB design done properly, it also needs external power and a clock signal of quality. Furthermore, filters need to be set by the designer and they can have great impact on the sound too. Audiophonics use DC to DC converters to supply the board and the Pi with a clean voltage. Also the analog stages were given special care in the shape of NJM 2114 op amps that are fed 12 volts power. The display and the rotary encoder are directly connected to the DAC PCB. If you buy the board separately at €129, you need to buy the tiny screen and the encoder separately at €8090 and €150. I always measure equipment, I review, to be sure that there are no faults. You can't conclude from measurements how good a device sounds but you can detect problems that might lead to a lesser sound. Therefore I stop publishing the measurements. In this case I must mention that the ES 9028 measures extremely well with very low noise figures and very good linearity. Scope images show pre and post echoes, meaning time smearing will be somewhat higher than the best DACs today offer. The Raspberry Pi comes with a 7.5 volt 2.9 amp switching mode power supply. In general, improvements in sound can be achieved by selecting a linear power supply or an audio grade switching mode power supply. Unfortunately I couldn't try this since the linear mode power supplies I have are limited to 1.5 amps while the screen alone draws more than half an amp. The difference a linear power supply offers might be less than in other cases given the attention that is given to the power distribution on the ES 9028 board. The software installed was the Pi Core Player but it could just as easy have been Volumeo, Max2Play, OpenElect or any other Raspberry Pi compatible player that supports the screen. If you already have a Logitech media server, LMS for short, running on a computer on NAS, like I do, you can start playing music right away. If not, you could easily install LMS on the rasp touch. This is done by a simple click in the LMS menu which is accessible by typing in the IP address of the rasp touch. You can find it by looking at the list in your router or use an app like Fink on your smartphone or tablet. Then I then set the network disk mount by naming the mount point net, but any name will do, entering the IP address of the server and the name of the share. SIFS is the right share unless you have a NAS that supports NFS. I also installed plugins to enable DSD playback and title. This can all be done using menu options. No special computer knowledge is needed, just some perseverance. Go to the browser again and type the IP address of the rasp touch, followed by colon 9000. The user interface of the Logitech media server will become visible. Click on settings in the lower right corner and set the media folder in the basic settings. Then go to the tab plugins and find the DSD player and title plugins and check the boxes in front of them. And click on apply in the lower right corner, that's all. And after you have set the media folders, LMS will start indexing the music right away. Depending on the size of your collection, this might take a long time, but that's only once. By the way, the computational power of the Raspberry Pi is of course limited. Therefore, LMS will only run satisfactorily if your music collection is a few hundred cds. Otherwise you have to do it on an external computer. If all is set and done, you no longer need a computer or tablet to control the rasp touch. You can use the touch screen to do about anything needed to play music. After starting up, you can select your music, select an artist and then an album, and if you like a track. It starts playing while the screen shows what is playing in a variety of screens, that can easily be selected by tapping on it. Since my LMS account knows login of title, I could go to title immediately and select my music there. All popular streaming services are supported, but I don't have an account other than title, so I can't show that. Internet radio is also easy and you can simply select, for instance, a local radio as shown here. All is done from the touch screen, but if you want you can also use a browser or on any computer, tablet or smartphone too, by typing the IP address followed by column 90000. You can store the address in the browser of course for future use. But you can also use apps on your smartphone or tablet that are designed to control the squeezebox, like squeezebox, squeezer, squeezeplay, squeezebox remote, squeezepad and many others. For a Raspberry Pi headboard DA converter, the ES9028 is relatively expensive at €129, but this certainly is the best DAC for Raspberry Pi I have heard. To be honest, the first that I would consider using in my set of three. Not that it equals the cord module DAC there, but it does make music, sounds open and lacks the harshness I hear in other headboards. But I must admit that given the poor results with earlier DAC boards are not completely up to date on the Raspberry Pi DAC boards. So if there is a manufacturer that thinks that he can beat this DAC, just let me know. Anyway, the sound quality of the ES9028 is surprisingly good for a DAC on a headboard for Raspberry Pi. I would have used a minimum phase filter to further improve the impulse response, but perhaps in this class the linear phase filter is more appreciated since it causes what some call dynamic sound. Anyway, compared to far more expensive DACs and CD players of, say, 10 years ago, this is so much better, it will surprise those that still use their 10 year old CD player. Félicitations à l'équipe Audiophonique. I had to do that in French. This is not the most delicate, high-end, super-duper audio streamer on the market. It is a streamer at a very affordable price that is almost ready to use. You only have to set the storage location of the music and the only thing missing is a clear manual for the device as offered. You might need to go to the pi-core player site for some settings of the software, but then you are set to go. This is the direction music reproduction is going and I like it. I just started to work on an even more compact solution, but at a higher price in the shape of a cocktail audio X35 amplifier, FM and DFB plus tuner, streamer, ripper, samba server and rune ready endpoint, all in one device. 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