Wolfson drivers not in next Raspbian update

I have a HifiBerry and it's been supported for a while now, at least from the day I got mine, which was a couple of months ago.

That's quite admirable considering it was created around November of last year and began selling around December.

From my personal experience with it, I can tell you it just works with pretty much everything you throw at it, and it sounds pretty good too.

However, it's with some sadness I admit this but:

* Hifiberry doesn't sound as good as the Wolfson. The TI 5102 chip doesn't hold a candle to the Wolfson chipset.

* It struggles (and often fails) playing the 24/96k sampler music files that comes with the Wolfson card. First thought it was the SD card (Sandisk class 6) not being able to keep up, but the music plays fine on the Wolfson even with a slower SD card (Sandisk class 4). The Wolfson chipset must somehow be offloading the decoding and playing of hi-res music whereas the HifiBerry relies heavily on the CPU.

* Hifiberry doesn't have a headphone amp. You must get some sort of amplifer, headphone or otherwise, in order to hear its full potential.

* Nor does it have any sort of microphone input - no built-in DMIC, no line input, no SPDIF in/out, just an RCA out.

* Hifiberry's a bit more expensive (39 Euros = ~ 45 USD) than the Wolfson (34 USD).

That said, however, I am using the Hifiberry a lot more than the Wolfson at the moment because the driver works perfectly, and works well with other software (namely Pulse Audio), which speaks volumes of the importance of software, no matter how superior the hardware is.

So, is submitting a PR just a matter of formality, and not a technical hurdle? And if not in the next update, then when approximately we can expect the Wolfson driver to be incorporated? Finally, when it is incorporated, will it work like the HifiBerry driver? As a loadable kernel module that can simply be modprobed?

I have a HifiBerry and it's been supported for a while now, at least from the day I got mine, which was a couple of months ago.

That's quite admirable considering it was created around November of last year and began selling around December.

From my personal experience with it, I can tell you it just works with pretty much everything you throw at it, and it sounds pretty good too.

However, it's with some sadness I admit this but:

* Hifiberry doesn't sound as good as the Wolfson. The TI 5102 chip doesn't hold a candle to the Wolfson chipset.

* It struggles (and often fails) playing the 24/96k sampler music files that comes with the Wolfson card. First thought it was the SD card (Sandisk class 6) not being able to keep up, but the music plays fine on the Wolfson even with a slower SD card (Sandisk class 4). The Wolfson chipset must somehow be offloading the decoding and playing of hi-res music whereas the HifiBerry relies heavily on the CPU.

* Hifiberry doesn't have a headphone amp. You must get some sort of amplifer, headphone or otherwise, in order to hear its full potential.

* Nor does it have any sort of microphone input - no built-in DMIC, no line input, no SPDIF in/out, just an RCA out.

* Hifiberry's a bit more expensive (39 Euros = ~ 45 USD) than the Wolfson (34 USD).

That said, however, I am using the Hifiberry a lot more than the Wolfson at the moment because the driver works perfectly, and works well with other software (namely Pulse Audio), which speaks volumes of the importance of software, no matter how superior the hardware is.

So, is submitting a PR just a matter of formality, and not a technical hurdle? And if not in the next update, then when approximately we can expect the Wolfson driver to be incorporated? Finally, when it is incorporated, will it work like the HifiBerry driver? As a loadable kernel module that can simply be modprobed?