I kind of went the opposite direction with dedicated small devices for each function - or at least that was the plan. It ended up being only two devices, with a Pi4 on general NAS duty, and a Pi Zero doing PiHole and VPN. There were going to be more, but the Pi4 ended up being powerful enough to...

My understanding of real time kernels is that they oftentimes sacrifice performance in order to give you the guarantees required for real-time operation. Unless you specifically need a real-time kernel there is almost never any point in using one. But, as you point out, for most uses, you are...

My "goto distro" is manjaro i3. I like i3 and the manjaro version was the first i3 dedicated distro where I liked all the defaults "out of the box".

@jerick70 is correct except that some self-powered DACs look for the 5V to "detect the signal" so won't do anything without it. For example: https://www.head-fi.org/threads/watts-up.800264/page-115#post-15551150 (in that post, the desktop DACs seem to use the 5V to "power the galvanic...

Must have been a programmer - it's well known that they can't tell the difference between DEC25 and OCT31.

I've been told that due to economies of scale TRS plugs are cheaper, as well as more readily available, then TS. I don't know if that's true, but it sounds plausible.

It is! And now I've used it on both ends of my Mojo :).

I'm currently "semi-emigrated" in that I'm working in a different country to where I normally live for an indefinite, but long, period of time, with no real plans to go back. What this means is I don't have my usual boxes of cables to hand so I had to improvise a bit, but both these worked...

A bit late, but I think this wooshed past a lot of people on this thread but I got the reference...

I have managed to use similar adapters successfully with a normal coax cable into a Mojo 1, so I believe it should work. I've even used a normal 3.5mm to 3.5mm jack *stereo* cable between a source with the same style of coax socket as the mojo (an OG FIIO X3, IIRC). I'll try and verify again...

I believe that DXD is just higher res PCM. According to https://help.nativedsd.com/en/articles/94634-dxd-resolution-explained "DXD is another name for 24/352.8k PCM or 32/352.8k PCM"

And aptX: https://darko.audio/2016/01/how-to-enable-aptx-bluetooth-audio-on-your-macbook-imac/ ...which was briefly useful when I had some noise-cancelling BT Senns for my daily commute which didn't support AAC. Also made the lack of aptX on the iPhone even more annoying...

I mentioned pipewire as I thought that Raspbian had already switched but AFAICT it is still on Pulseaudio so the thread I Iinked to is more relevant than I thought. So you might be able to do it with PulseAudio. But I believe that Manjaro and/or Arch have pipewire at least available. I only have...

I think pipewire can do this. One of my ex-colleagues used to do this sort of thing and, at that time, I believe he used "jack", which was superseded by pulseaudio, and then pipewire. Unfortunately I don't know any of the details but this may be relevant...

The problem you are likely to encounter with optical to USB conversion is that the DAC is expecting the USB to come from a USB host, and the USB out of the converters I have come across acts like a USB client - i.e. it looks like a USB microphone rather than a host computer. So, neither end will...