@mc.god Airoha AB1565 looks interesting for future designs - small package, dedicated DSP core, BT, - something to consider... I will take a note of this producer. The downside of smaller producers like Airoha is availability of hardware and undefined product life time - too agile, too risky for long lasting hw designs. With NXP MCUs you have a guarantee from NXP that selected MCU has some defined lifetime and it is extremely important for long-term projects like Neutron HiFi DAC V1 (even if such NXP MCU is phased out it is possible to find it from stock distributors). Although both MCUs are Cortex-M4 in practice these are absolutely different devices with own specific peripherals, SDK API, behavior, performance metrics and etc. So it is not easy to replace one with another.
I think it worth trying. Currently NConfigurator is in active development phase, once stabilized it will go into Neutron Player and then such functionality (communication via PCM I/O streams) will be very useful.