Recommend a DAC

[Park13]

I didn't pay attention, your are playing on a Google max Speaker. Sorry I thought your system sounded like a Google speaker and you wanted better. But in this case just buy the cheapest DAC, you would not hear the difference anyway with this speaker.

No I am going eventually get a better speaker.  So meanwhile get the apdapter for DAC and Max speaker for now?

I have no idea how the Google Max speaker is controlled or how it can access digitally encoded audio, but the Google site says of it

Supported Audio Formats
HE-AAC
LC-AAC
MP3
Vorbis
WAV (LPCM)
Opus
FLAC with support for high-resolution streams (24-bit/96KHz)

It would seem to me you would be best served going that route if you can figure out how it works.

If you want to drive it via its 3.5mm analog audio input, then you really need to know what its input sensitivity and input impedance is. IIRC the Raspberry Pi output was supposed to be about 1Vpp (peak-to-Peak). That's the same as output of the Adafruit DAC Hat. Some DACs are rated more like 2Vpp. 

In any case the output impedance of the DAC and the input impedance of the Google Max should be appropriate. Most DACs, not even the RPi onboard DAC, are not designed to drive low-impedance headphones even though the presence of a 3.5mm jack might suggest one is.

I can't find a statement on the Google site of the input sensitivity or the impedance of the Google Max.

I agree with @Alaini93. If an external DAC is the answer, I'd buy the cheapest DAC which works in this application and leave more expensive products on the shelf until the rest of the future system has been chosen.

Regards,
Kent

Kent,

Thank you for the education.  Very well explained.