If you are a casual listener, I would just go with the Raspberry Pi DAC Pro. I have never listened to one.
Looking at the PCB, it appears to be a slave DAC (I don't see any onboard clock oscillators). The PCM5242 datasheet says "the integrated PLL on the device removes the requirement for a system clock (commonly known as master clock), allowing a 3-wire I2S connection and reducing system EMI."
The HiFiBerry DAC2 Pro does have "integrated dual-domain low-jitter clocks".
Why NOS?
More of an analog sound character. I realized that my original Allo Boss sounded best with SoX upsampling to 32/384, which turns off internal chip oversampling. All of the OS DACs I tried seemed to have annoying digital artifacts. "Digital horns", for example. An NOS DAC was the answer for me, which all seem to have a more analog sound character.
Looking at the PCB, it appears to be a slave DAC (I don't see any onboard clock oscillators). The PCM5242 datasheet says "the integrated PLL on the device removes the requirement for a system clock (commonly known as master clock), allowing a 3-wire I2S connection and reducing system EMI."
The HiFiBerry DAC2 Pro does have "integrated dual-domain low-jitter clocks".
Why NOS?
More of an analog sound character. I realized that my original Allo Boss sounded best with SoX upsampling to 32/384, which turns off internal chip oversampling. All of the OS DACs I tried seemed to have annoying digital artifacts. "Digital horns", for example. An NOS DAC was the answer for me, which all seem to have a more analog sound character.
Hardware: RPi Zero W | Allo Kali | ProtoDAC TDA1387 X8 | PGA2311 | Icepower 500ASP | Harbeth SHL5
Software: Moode 8.3.3
Source: Win 10 NAS
Software: Moode 8.3.3
Source: Win 10 NAS
