I’ve never had an opportunity of listening to DACs higher up in the Schiit range to know how good they are. I know I am not spitting out garbage to my DAC and if I find issues with my sound it is likely somewhere else. Schiit Wyrd is the USB regenerator that cleans your USB signal a bit, but in my experience, its effects were very limited and its value not so great. Sound quality is good, no noise or jitter audible to me (using digital interlink to a DAC to a tube amp and the ~11 Euro Allo switching PSU).

Not sure of the details, but it’s almost certainly a speed issue – the software drivers running on the Pi didn’t respond to hardware interrupts quickly enough, and packets were being dropped.

To me, the DigiOne (or DigiOne Player, if you look for a complete player) are the best choice possible as of now if you own an S/PDIF DAC, or if you know for sure that the implementation of S/PDIF receiver in your DAC is superior than the USB side. At first, I did not have a special power source and used both the SMPSs, but the Allo Battery Pack that uses four 18650 Lithium batteries was sent to me in the last week to try out. The controls can be accessed via smartphone, tablet or computer, without connecting a mouse or keyboard to the minicomputer. Allo have designed a digital (S/PDIF) transport for Raspberry Pi audio with one goal in mind: Absolut best S/PDIF output. Can I just say that although I am very much into “Schiit” products (I know how this reads, but you know what I mean), I was very happy with the Modi 3 which I previously had (see John Darko’s review if unsure).

The only thing left to turn your Raspberry Pi into a full flagged audiophile streamer is using all this with a low noise power supply, but that’s a topic we’ll cover another time.To me the sound improvements are mostly in areas where the sound is sustained for a while, like with vocals and brass instruments where they do a fade on a relative constant note.