Pi with an off board USB DAC?

It's a standard USB audio device, so it should "just work". From the manual: "For most builds of Linux with the DacMagic 100 switched to USB Audio 1.0 the DacMagic 100 will work with the native Audio 1.0 driver and accept audio up to 24-bit/96kHz. Some very new builds of Linux are now supporting USB Audio 2.0 for which the Dacmagic 100 should be switched to Audio 2.0 support to accept audio up to 24-bit/192kHz."

And this says it's fully supported:

digital to digital they likely sound OK (they have line level audio output too, which obviously uses some sort of DAC so may not be great).

Only the one internal to my HDMI TV

t says driverless on the website, I'm assuming that means it uses some USB stabdard interface, HID or whatever the equivalent is for audio, so it should work just fine with the pi.

Thanks - very useful.

Switching the DacMagic to USB Audio 2.0 is something of a black art.

Once done by arcane button pressing and much cursing, it is recognised as a different device by Windows and you can then install the Cambridge Audio driver which seems to manage to keep it in USB Audio 2.0 from then on.

Note that until you manage to get it to switch modes you cannot install the driver and thus you cannot upgrade the firmware. Not the best 'out of the box' experience although support was prompt and good.

I suspect the challenge will to be to convince the Pi to use the 2.0 driver.

Anyway, looks promising.

Another Pi could be going on my birthday list.

Oh, and I am very wary of line level audio output - the DAC makes a huge difference compared to 'line out' from various sources such as PC, phone, tablet.

Cheers

Dave R

Jim Lesurf over in uk.comp.os.linux has been doing lots of USB audio things lately (on Linux and RISC OS). I think one of his test platforms is a Pi.

Theo