My project is to see what happens when I replace a PC (I have Wintel and Mac) used as a transport with an external DAC (I have Beresford and Asus) with a ‘hifipi’.
At the moment I have the pi running Volumio wired to the network with music files on a NetGear NAS CIFS mounted outputting through a Beresford DAC. This has been achieved with some searching and gnashing of teeth (for the the sec=ntlm fix was the breakthrough)
My initial impressions are very favourable. Playing 16 bit files so far has been pretty much faultless. Playing 24 bit files produces the occasional soft dropout (not a pop/click, just a momentary quietness). Playing 24/192 - well that doesn’t really work at all. However, feeling are that I’m quite happy to have this in the system and don’t really miss the Mac at all.
I’ve played with Linux -based sound before and though it a little ‘laid back’ in comparison with a windows - based system. But I’m not noticing that with the Pi/Volumio combination.
I have a HiFiBerry Dac on order, which hopefully will remove some of the sound quality shortcomings I currently have.