Richard Mudhar

sounds, sensors, stones

Cirrus Logic audio card for the

Raspberry Pi revisited

There is more green space and trees around me where I am now, with many
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 more garden birds, though no sparrows1, and occasionally some tawny owls
in the night.

00:00 00:43

Tawny owls, recorded ME66 handheld

So thoughts turn to a garden recording gizmo again. I have enough power,

and a network connection to a shed, a oddly wind-sheltered location and
many trees nearby. For short term recordings in the field I am still in favour
of the timed field recorder approach, but for the garden where I have power
and data the Pi still scores. You don’t have to fiddle with it, it’s entirely
remote controlled. Many years ago I had a PC in the garage which was the
music server, I used a piece of software called loop recorder on that. This cat
fight is one of my favourite urban recordings from that time.

00:00 00:00

although I was really trying to record a hedge full of sparrows. A loop

recorder lets you go back and catch things like that, and the microphone
would be much closer to the area where the owls are.

So I thought I’d revisit this Cirrus Logic audio card, particularly as a case for
a Pi with this mounted was being sold o" cheap for £5

The Cirrus is the only audio card for the Raspberry Pi that lets you record
sound with it, as opposed to the legion of DAC cards for the Pi. You can, of
course, use a USB sound card instead, though that precludes using a Model A
if you want to use wifi and have the lowest power.
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 The good news is that a hero hacker, Matthias Reichl, has sorted out the
drivers, it’s now a RPI-update rather than patching kernels and esoteric
crap.

The bad news is that the manufacturer discontinued the card Having said
that, it still seems to be available for about £60 if you work hard enough,
GIYF. That’s dear – a Behringer UCA202 is a good Pi compatible USB sound
card for about £24, line level input. The Cirrus Logic card o"ers a bit more
sensitivity and on board mic bias.

Installation process

It’s not absolutely futz-free, though it’s far better than it used to be. I’ve
never managed to blow a Raspberry Pi board, so I have a fine collection of old
boards from my Pi history, the very first one is still in service collecting
sensor data.

For this job I will select a Raspberry Pi B+ with Ethernet, the first model with
the 40-pin GPIO and the HAT physical format, because that’s what the
Cirrus wants. I could use an A+, but I want Ethernet, because paradoxically
trunking WiFi to the shed with some patch antennas works fine but doesn’t
give me WiFi at the shed, and I want lots of USB connectors spare, because I
will probably be recording using real spinning HDD, because – well SD cards
burn out whereas spinning metal seems to last. Plus the latter is fast,
although recording audio really shouldn’t be an I/O challenge even for SD
these days.

1. Get new raspi-stretch lite, load without card attached

2. works, enable ssh, enable key, test key login
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 3. sudo apt-get update, sudo apt-get upgrade
4. Now visit http://www.horus.com/~hias/cirrus-driver.html and do as the
man says
5. sudo nano /boot/config.txt, can the internal audio and add the line as
instructed
6. sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/cirrus.conf, add line
7. wget http://www.horus.com/~hias/tmp/cirrus/cirrus-ng-scripts.tgz,
make bin directory, do it
8. sudo shutdown -h now, wait for green blinkenlights, pull power and
attach card
9. Restart Pi, log in
10. execute the bin/Record_from_Linein_Micbias.sh file, which terminated
silently

Now I run alsamixer, knowing that I have killed o" the internal sound card.
I’m only interested in record, if I wanted just play I’d go buy myself a cheap
DAC HAT and save myself a ton of trouble. Don’t even think of using the F4
button to switch to Capture, use the arrow key to get to the relevant section
and then the tab key to select in section, because alsamixer is ratty and will
crash if you press F4. You get this

This ba!ing mixer setup ain’t the half of it

but in fact what you actually want is all the way to the right, so make with the
right arrow key, past all that equaliser crap
:
 all the way to the right is the interesting stu"

The implication is that I am looking at IN3L and IN3R, because IN1L,R and
IN2 L,R are set to 0, and hopefully nobody’s tossing anything in on DIG 1,2,3,
although in a perfect world it would be nice to see them set to 0 too. Nice that
the noise generator is set to 0, though the noise gate is worrying, apparently
that means

Noise Gate Threshold: [dB Gain: -90.00]

What that means in real life, well, your guess is as good as mine, but I’ll leave
it well alone for now.

To get to record from the card you need to know what you’re recording from,
so I set 1kHz tone going in and do this

arecord -l
**** List of CAPTURE Hardware Devices ****
card 0: RPiCirrus [RPi-Cirrus], device 0: WM5102 AiFi wm5102-aif1-0
[]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

It’s either RPiCirrus or it’s RPi-Cirrus, I’ll save you the experimentation, it’s
the former
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 arecord -Dhw:RPiCirrus -r 48000 -c 2 -f S16_LE -d 5 testy.wav
Recording WAVE 'testy.wav' : Signed 16 bit Little Endian, Rate 48000
Hz, Stereo

when I FTP the result o" the Pi and look at it I get

Recorded 1kHz tone

Which looks OK – there’s a slight phase di"erence and the usual DC bump at
the start – try and start recording at least a quarter second of deadspace to
let that die o".

So it does basically work, with a stock Pi with a minimum of fiddling about.

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 Win.

Adjusting levels

The nominal gain of IN3 is 8dB (displayed as 16). If I crank it all the way I can
get up to 31dB, displayed as 100. So I will try that on IN3R.

Looks good, about 23dB di"erence

This confirms IN3 is the input I am dealing with. I wasn’t really able to
convince myself the mic bias ever came on. I could have had this information
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 easier if I’d used the Source, because in the file rpi-cirrus-functions.sh is the
section

# input base names

headset_in="IN1"
dmic_in="IN2"
line_in="IN3"

but where’s the fun in that, eh? You can find the original of the scripts on
Github. Apparently Matthias’ sterling work is all to do with LibreELEC which
is designed to be just enough OS to run KODI, so the fact that recording is
looked at at all is impressive, since you don’t normally record anything with
a media server.

bu!er overruns

arecord -Dhw:RPiCirrus -r 48000 -c 2 -f S16_LE -d 600 testy.wav

Recording WAVE 'testy.wav' : Signed 16 bit Little Endian, Rate 48000
Hz, Stereo
overrun!!! (at least 80.227 ms long)
overrun!!! (at least 250.903 ms long)
overrun!!! (at least 372.018 ms long)
overrun!!! (at least 388.525 ms long)
overrun!!! (at least 1433.851 ms long)
overrun!!! (at least 186.375 ms long)
overrun!!! (at least 25.032 ms long)
overrun!!! (at least 970.541 ms long)

Everyone and his dog starts o" recording to the same SD card that the OS is
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 on, and you get bu"er overruns. There are all sorts of reasons why you
shouldn’t record audio to the OS SD card, but overruns seems to be the
obvious one. This thread seems to confirm this, the OS is busy with the SD
card at times so it can’t write your audio.

So I mounted a USB stick. You get to run as sudo because you’re writing to a
device, there’s probably a way to fix that but for now I’ll run with it

sudo arecord -Dhw:RPiCirrus -r 48000 -c 2 -f S16_LE -d 300 testy.wav

Recording WAVE 'testy.wav' : Signed 16 bit Little Endian, Rate 48000
Hz, Stereo
overrun!!! (at least 268.754 ms long)
overrun!!! (at least 373.587 ms long)
overrun!!! (at least 48.686 ms long)
overrun!!! (at least 273.932 ms long)

Nice try but no cigar. How about using FLAC? It reduces the IO, but it also
o"ers the possibility of using jstsch’s massive interpass bu"er trick.

arecord -c 2 -f S16_LE -d 130 -r 44100 | flac -o test1.flac - -f

flac 1.3.2
Copyright (C) 2000-2009 Josh Coalson, 2011-2016 Xiph.Org Foundation
flac comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. This is free software, and
you are
welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions. Type `flac' for
details.

Recording WAVE 'stdin' : Signed 16 bit Little Endian, Rate 44100 Hz,
Stereo -: wrote 3680289 bytes, ratio=0.160
:
 Hmm, looks OK2 without the bu"er on the USB drive for 5 mins (set to 48k to
be the same as previous ones where it barfed). Flac gets the sudo this time
because it has the job of writing to the USB stick.

arecord -c 2 -f S16_LE -d 600 -r 48000 | sudo flac -o test1.flac - -

f
Recording WAVE 'stdin' : Signed 16 bit Little Endian, Rate 48000 Hz,
Stereo

flac 1.3.2
Copyright (C) 2000-2009 Josh Coalson, 2011-2016 Xiph.Org Foundation
flac comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. This is free software, and
you are
welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions. Type `flac' for
details.

-: wrote 41235318 bytes, ratio=0.358

input bu"er trick (onto the normal disk)

arecord -c 2 -f S16_LE -d 5 -r 44100 --buffer-size=192000 -f dat -t

raw | dd bs=480000 | flac -o test1.flac - -f --endian=little --
channels=2 --sample-rate=44100 --sign=signed --bps=16

which seemed to go OK for the 5 sec duration, so if it turns out I need it I have
the command line. It’s a lot of fa" to go to if it’s not needed.

Analogue issues
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 There are three problems with using this for an electret mike:

1. The mic bias doesn’t work

2. sensitivity is low, it is a line input after all. OTOH I can boost it by 23dB
3. I tested it playing from a Behringer 302 sound card main mix output
(phono unbalanced) in parallel with the input to an amplifier. I hear a
distinct change in tone and level for the duration of the recording, not
huge, but implying the input impedance of this is low. Behringer claim
these outputs are 470Ω

It occurred to me that if the circuit conditions change such that I can hear a
di"erence with it bridged across a 470Ω bus, perhaps the mic bias also only
comes on on record. Measurement confirmed this, an open-loop voltage of
2.7V appears if I execute Record_from_Linein_Micbias.sh, but only for the
duration of the recording. It seems I need a deeper understanding of the
analogue performance of this board.

At maximum gain (100) I applied 133mV p-p (~47mV rms) which when
replayed was -2.8dBFS, so 0dBFS ~ 64mVrms

That’s low sensitivity for a mic input, typical electrets will give 25mV/Pa
@1kHz. Trouble is 1Pa is pretty damn loud, a diesel truck at 10m.
Conversational speech at 1m is 2% of that, about 34dB down. You’ll get some
signal if you holler at at electret mic with mic bias on, but the birds won’t
shift the needle on the dial. I am probably about 40dB o". Sure, it’s a digital
system and you want 12-20dB of headroom to 0dBFS, but that’s still a
shortfall of 30dB, I want a mic gain of about 30 times.

My microphone is going to be about 20 yards from the Pi. I had fondly

thought it would be as simple as running a coax cable with mic bias out to the
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 mic from an input more sensitive than this. If I need to amplify, I may as well
run the Pi at the lowest sensitivity and make the head amplifier work for its
living.

Which would also work for running the Pi with a standard USB sound card
like the Behringer UCA202, which is a line level sensitivity one… This project
has metamorphosed from a Pi project to a remote mic preamp project. I am
ok with the Pi side of things now, once I get the case, time to box the sucker
up, and think about a gizmo to sort out the mic interface. If I take a typical
audio coax cable I get a capacitance of 340pf/m, so 20m of that will be 6.8nF.

Your typical electret is a audio variable current source developing a voltage

across the plug-in-power bias resistor of about 6k8 in parallel with the input
impedance of the amplifier input. Let’s guess about 5k.

Across that is the cable capacitance. The impedance of that 6.8nF is about
1.2k at 20kHz, so it will clobber high frequencies. At least I can feel better
about the Cirrus Logic not being sensitive enough to run an electret mic
barefoot – things like robins will get rolled o", although the tawny will
probably make it OK. I need to do better here.

Interestingly enough, Frank the binaural head guy has used the Cirrus Logic
and the UCA202 barefoot with electret capsules, and is doing well. I don’t feel
happy with the gain distribution running such a low signal into these cards,
but he is out there and doing it… Perhaps I am missing something here, but
the sound recordist in me just can’t relate to running a rig normalised to
40dB down on 0dBFS.

He seems to advocate listening at a low level, but somehow I feel it’s good to
get the gain up early to capture with a higher SNR and attenuate later if the
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 desire is low SPL. His feed is here, and in fairness ambient noise swamps mic
and input stage hiss, which speaks for his technique in Ormskirk anyway.

1. there are sparrows a few houses down from me, which pleases me.
2. There is a possibility in the back of my mind that perhaps piping the
output of arecord into flac is masking the error messages to stdout. I
don’t know enough about linux to say if that is the case, or how to test
it.

richard / February 17, 2018 / audio

5 thoughts on “Cirrus Logic audio card for the

Raspberry Pi revisited”

John Davies
February 18, 2018 at 11:07 am

I like the cat fight

Re: arecord error messages. Error messages should go to “stderr” which is

usually the same as “stdout”. You could try redirecting stderr to a file as a
test, this post describes it better than I can –
https://askubuntu.com/questions/625224/how-to-redirect-stderr-to-a-
file
:
 Did you ever try a remote mic over Bluetooth, or is that just opening a
di"erent can of worms?

richard 
February 19, 2018 at 12:45 pm

Inspired by your comment, I tried the verbose version of arecord with the -
vv flag. There were overruns because this was ont othe SD card, but not
only did I get record level control and a load of useful gu" and flag-ups of
the overrun, but the flac was fine (other than a glitch audible on the second
overrun). Which confirms that errors are displayed, and that they don’t get
piped into the flac as garbage.

For mics in the garden as a loop record the trouble with bluetooth is
powering the remote mics. Oddly enough for actual recording manually an
issue with BT is the slight delay, which makes monitoring a challenge.

$ arecord -c 2 -f S16_LE -d 60 -r 48000 -vv | sudo flac -o test

1.flac - -f
Recording WAVE 'stdin' : Signed 16 bit Little Endian, Rate 48000
Hz, Stereo

flac 1.3.2
Copyright (C) 2000-2009 Josh Coalson, 2011-2016 Xiph.Org
Foundation
flac comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. This is free software,
and you are
welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions. Type `flac'
for details.

Plug PCM: Hardware PCM card 0 'RPi-Cirrus' device 0 subdevice 0

:
 Its setup is:
stream : CAPTURE
access : RW_INTERLEAVED
format : S16_LE
subformat : STD
channels : 2
rate : 48000
exact rate : 48000 (48000/1)
msbits : 16
buffer_size : 24000
period_size : 6000
period_time : 125000
tstamp_mode : NONE
tstamp_type : MONOTONIC
period_step : 1
avail_min : 6000
period_event : 0
start_threshold : 1
stop_threshold : 24000
silence_threshold: 0
silence_size : 0
boundary : 1572864000
appl_ptr : 0
hw_ptr : 0
##################################################+| 98%overrun!!!
(at least 299.147 ms long)
Status:
state : XRUN
trigger_time: 392.781707728
tstamp : 0.000000
delay : 0
avail : 24000
avail_max : 24000
##################################################+| 98%-: 36%
complete,
ratio=0##################################################+|
98%overrun!!! (at least 1030.215 ms long)
Status:
state : XRUN
trigger_time: 417.839336910
:
 tstamp : 0.000000
delay : 0
avail : 24000
avail_max : 24000
###############################wrote 4445088 bytes, ratio=0.386

Andrew Weekes
July 18, 2019 at 11:54 am

There’s currently 719 of the original Wolfson branded audio board available
and with the new drivers and a little bit of work, they can be connected to the
newer Pi’s. I’ve got a guide here: https://alw-audio.co.uk/?p=605

richard 
July 19, 2019 at 12:38 pm

Interesting mod – hat tip for perseverance and ingenuity! The guy using
the stacking header makes this less tough. The whole thing has been
overtaken IMO by the audioinjector zero which doesn’t need all that
microsurgery and is more or less the same price from Amazon. The
audioinjector has the same problem of a lack of sensitivity on line in but is
otherwise easier to use and a whole lot smaller. Doesn’t have the SPDIF I/O,
however.

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