WM8960 Hi-Fi Sound Card HAT for Raspberry Pi 5/Pi 4B/3B+/Pi3B/Pi Zero 2W/ Zero W/Zero WH, Support Stereo Encode/Decode, Play/Record, Directly Drives Speakers to Play Music

Installing this hardware using their instructions on the website results in a black screen and the instructions say to downgrade to a 32 bit version of the OS to be compatible. Not acceptable as the standard recommended OS is now 64 bit.

This is a great sound card for the Raspberry Pi, and if you’re using your Pi to directly drive any audio devices, you’ll want a separate sound card like this. Raspberry Pi’s use a simple PWM audio output, which works mostly fine, but if you want hi-fi sound, you need a sound card. This one is built around the Wolfson Microelectronics WM8960 chip, which is designed to provide high quality audio in portable electronics (e.g. cell phones), and drive the on-board speakers and headphone jack, and handle microphone input.It uses Pins 2, 3, and 17-21, as well as power and ground. It extends the GPIO pins through this HAT, so you can attach another hat on top if needed. You can see, I attached it to a Pi4 that was already in a case. I put a small piece of tape over the bottom of the terminal blocks to electrically isolate it from the metal top of my case.This sound card offers the following Pros and cons:Pros:1) It can directly drive speakers up to 1 W. It even comes with two such speakers, so if you need a compact, portable audio system where you need the Pi to drive speakers directly without going to an amplifier first, then this card can do it. Admittedly, I’m not sure there are a lot of applications for this, but this is one of the few cards that can do it.2) It has 3 output connection options: 3.5mm Aux output, terminal blocks, and a JST style connector for the included speakers. The 3.5mm Aux output can crank out 40mW into a 16 ohm load. Obviously, you can use this to drive an external amplifier too.3) It has dual onboard microphones, so you can record voice and ambient sound into the Pi. Also, the speakers it came with actually sound pretty good for their size and have some decent volume for only being 1W.4) It uses the Pi's I2S interface, which is designed specifically for high quality audio. Not to be confused with I2C, which is not for audio.5) All Waveshare products come with excellent documentation on their wiki page. This card comes with very complete startup documentation to get the card installed and running on the Pi. I followed these directions and encountered a problem due to still having a 32-bit kernel. The documentation already had a fix for this error listed in the FAQ at the end of the instructions (I just had to set arm_64bit=0 in the /boot/config.txt file). I also had to follow the instructions to restart the soundcard service to get the Aux output to work. After this everything worked perfectly! Thank you Waveshare for always having excellent documentation!Cons:1) No audio input (other than mic). Since this uses the WM8960 chip that was designed for cell phones, this card only has those types of functions (speakers, Aux out, and mic input). What it doesn’t have is a “line input” so you can get audio into the Pi! If you want to use this Audio HAT to build a guitar pedal or effects unit, you won’t be able to do that. There are very, very few Audio HATs that let you feed audio into the Pi from an external source, and unfortunately this is not one of them.2) The FAQ doesn’t cover everything, and I had some trouble running their test codes for the microphone record/playback. I got all sorts of errors for various little things (default paths not right, etc.). However, I know the microphones work because I can still do a voice search in a web browser using them. I just am having a hard time with the examples, but these are things I can eventually fix for my own Pi's configuration.Overall, this is a great Audio HAT to elevate your sound quality from the Pi. But, if you need a line input so you can process incoming audio, then this is not the card for you. Otherwise, 5 stars!

I spent several hours trying different scripts and never could get this HAT and speakers to work with my Pi4B. Unfortunately, I can't recommend them.

The great thing about the Raspberry Pi (really any generation) is that it's designed to be tinkered with and there are lots of add-ons like "HAT" boards to be found that add additional capabilities to the Pi. This Hi-Fi sound card is a GREAT example of what a HAT can do. Assembly couldn't be easier - you just remove the HAT and speakers from the box, plug in the speakers and push the HAT on to the GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi. You DO have to then run some terminal commands (once you boot up your Pi) to install the drivers and enable the audio output (and input) through the sound card but that's consistent with most things on Raspberry Pi and Linux in general.Once put together and the drivers are installed, both the speakers (or 3.5" port if you want) and the microphone work REALLY well. The sound quality out and in is quite good particularly for a small single board computer. You still are limited by the performance of the Raspberry Pi that you use, but it's still a very enjoyable audio experience. The board and speakers are certainly "maker" in nature as with most Pi related things, but the soldiering seems to be good quality and all the ports and whatnot appear to be well-made.So if you want to fiddle with adding additional audio capabilities in hardware to your Raspberry Pi, this is a great way to do it. Give it a try today!

Let’s face it, these things would’ve been a lot cooler a decade ago when you can’t buy an extremely powerful computer that sits in your pocket with excellent camera microphone speakers GPS and all sorts of sensors. Phones have made the devices you can make with accessories like this much less impressive but no less fun to actually make. I have a small portable video game machine that fits into a tiny briefcase. I essentially build a laptop except it’s much bigger and less professional looking but it was still really fun to make and it’s cool opening up a tiny briefcase to show a miniature arcade complete with controllers and built-in battery screen and sound. These tiny little guys added sound to my raspberry pi. You can actually do that with the basic Pi. But this is an advance sound card that I let you do in coding as well as decoding and the speakers require no external power.So all in all this makes a neat little accessory for your tiny Pi projectsI

The WM8960 is a rather nice sound card for the PI and does produce great Hi-Fi sound. The included mic and speakers work rather well but they are certainly not the greatest but that was not my intention with this card but I did dock a star since the sound quality of the included speakers is a bit, well, underwhelming. Wiring up different speakers along with additional power, you can make an incredible setup with this to par some of the other Hi-Fi BLE devices on the market. Overall, it's a fantastic board, well soldered, clear instructions on their wiki and no complaints what so ever there.