Angry about it? Seems a bit intense.I must say that I am a bit angry. Because there are 2 contradictory opinions (on this forum too I guess) about using hats for Raspberry. Some say that hats have no sense, just use USB out of R-Pi board (just use a good PS for the board), some say that with hat (like Allo USBridge) there is better sound quality. John Darko says that USB in Raspberry is shit (ab. 5:10 in link below)
Pi-Squeeze! A DIRT-CHEAP music STREAMING system (+ ROON alternative) - YouTube
Where is the truth?
The Pi3 was considered "bad" because its network card shares the usb bus with the USB ports, so in theory more data is moved around on the same bus to get data in over the network and out via usb. Theory is that this could lead to data congestion and being dropped, though this would lead to sound stopping rather than any degradation. Does this actually happen in the real world? Never experienced it, even with 24/192 tracks with a pi3 over wifi/wired.
Some also think the pi USB is noisy but as have been shown here and elsewhere $10-$50 DAC's manage to suppress noise over USB so who cares?
Because of this everyone decided that hat's were the answer because they don't use the USB bus. But as shown above this probably makes no real difference. Not to mention that they can also suffer from noise from the Pi, some have dedicated power supplies to reduce this. Does this make a difference? Possibly, but the real problem is that DAC's used in HAT's generally aren' as good as those available in USB DACs. A USB DAC doesn't have the same space/power constraints as a hat and as a result has better measured results.
Does Darko know what he's talking about, or back up his allegations with any data? Not really.