i'm trying to put together a streamer to be connected to the smsl su-8 v2. i had initially thought that it would simply be a affair of getting a raspberry pi 4 and throwing volumio etc on it and i'd be good to go, but as i went down the rabbit hole i'm starting to have doubts that if i don't get more complicated than that my SINAD might suffer. case in point, the allo website (
https://allo.com/sparky/usbridge.html) claims that there's noise from the USB and i need some sort of "transport" to solve this issue. it attaches two AP reports, one with rpi+dac and the other with usbridge+dac which i admittedly do not know how to interpret. on the other hand, i've read that the DAC should handle any noise coming out of the RPI just fine. I really don't want to spend $250 and end up with a rube goldberg machine. hopefully someone here can help me make sense of what these NDK and LDOs do exactly, what do the AP measurements say, how they actually help with noise and if after all that does it really even matter when the signal comes out the DAC end?
I will be streaming over flac over Ethernet from my NAS, Spotify from WiFi and TV will go in to the DAC toslink.
EDIT: I'm studying their AP report, is "noise ratio" the number i need to be looking at? that number is -74db out of the schiit modi+rpi and -84 out of the schiit modi+usbridge. granted this is for the rpi3 i believe. so 10db of difference?