Khadas Tone Board vs Audiophonic Sabre ES9038Q2M DAC

[Deleted member 6802]

Hallo, i am thinking of switching my Arcam irDAC, Squeezbox Touch and NAS for a one box solution. Raspberry Pi with a DAC. From my research i end up leaning towards Khadas Tone Board but notice the less known Audiophonic Sabre ES9038Q2M DAC on the internet. Can anyone tell me whats the difference between these 2?

I will be using this one box solution with my DK Design Group VS.1 Reference MKII analog amplifer and Epos K3 speakers. Will these DACs be good enough for my setup or do i need to look for the 8 channel version of ES9038 DAC?

 

[FooYatChong]

The Audiophonic is a Raspberry Pi HAT board. It plugs into the PI's 40 pin GPIO connector.
The Khadas would need to function as a seperate DAC, connected over USB.

 

[Deleted member 6802]

The Audiophonic is a Raspberry Pi HAT board. It plugs into the PI's 40 pin GPIO connector.
The Khadas would need to function as a seperate DAC, connected over USB.

Will it affect performance to connect a DAC with USB vs GPIO connector? and is there no difference between these 2 DACs sound wise?

 

[rodz37]

Interested to see how the two compare also.

 

[panulee]

wondering how you guys went about this...
looking into these 2 plus the sanskrit mk2 and cannot decide, any people who a/b'ed them care to comment? tia

I'm very much interested to assemble a system on top of the pi (using an AMP hat) and a volume pot included in this bundle.