No sound from Pirate Audio 3W Stereo Amp

Support
1

Very smart looking board and the display works well, but I can’t can’t get any sound from the speakers - what am I doing wrong?
Tested on a RaspPi W with recent Raspbian (2019-09-26-raspbian-buster.img), and an earlier Raspbian (2019-06-20-raspbian-buster-full.img)

I can start a local MP3 file playing via Iris and the Pirate Audio display shows progress and responds to buttons (which sync with Iris and vice-versa). No sound with streaming radio (via M3U) or Spotify either.
Tested with COM1601 mini speakers & Adafruit 3" speakers - both of which work on the HiFiBerry Pi Zero MiniAMP.

“sudo systemctl status mopidy” gives info while MP3 is “playing” without sound.

  • Mixer volume set to 40
  • Starting Mopidy audio
  • Starting Mopidy backends: StreamBackend, M3UBackend, FileBackend
  • Audio output set to “alsasink”
  • Starting Mopidy core
  • Starting Mopidy frontends: RaspberryGPIOFrontend, PiDiFrontend, IrisFrontend, MpdFrontend, HttpFrontend
  • Starting Iris 3.42.2
  • MPD server running at [::ffff:0.0.0.0]:6600
  • HTTP server running at [::ffff:0.0.0.0]:6680
  • Starting GLib mainloop
2

I will hazard a guess that you need to disable the pi’s onboard audio in /boot/config.txt by making sure this one near the bottom appears as follows

#dtparam=audio=on

Which renders the onboard sound inoperable and makes the pirateaudio board the default for Mopidy

3

Brilliant wildestpixel, it works!

Internet streaming radio works perfectly :-) Echo / Alexa’s days are numbered! No more flaky BBC Sounds.