Greg Erskine wrote: 
> The RPi has 4 audio options:
> 
> 1. Analog thru headphone jack
> 2. HDMI (I think I2S may be available thru HDMI)
> 3. USB
> 4. I2S thru GPIOs
> 
> All (well 99%) audio DAC chips use I2S as their input. So going through
> USB adds a couple of extra steps in the digital to analog process.
> 
But USB is a purely digital, bit-perfect connection. I don't see how it
would affect the digital-analog conversion in any way. Anybody care to
explain? From my (surely incomplete) understanding, USB audio interfaces
usually work just as well as sound cards directly hooked up to the
board. Yeah, you may need a USB buffer of 1-2 ms or so to account for
slightly higher latency of USB, but that's about it.

---

I read numerous times on Slashdot that USB on the RPi has issues due to
a controller that's broken in hardware (problems with sharing of
resources on internal busses). However, I've also read there that later
versions of the RPi (particularly, the B+) have addressed many of the
issues.
Maybe, USB audio on the RPi has gotten a bit of a bad rap due to
problems in earlier revisions. I think USB DACs deserve more love in
picoreplayer and other distros. After all, the Hifiberry is ridiculously
expensive: one Hifiberry (EUR 30) + one Hifiberry case (EUR 15) going to
Germany comes out to EUR 66 after factoring in shipping (EUR 10) and
import taxes (EUR 11). In difference to that, a high-quality USB DAC
(Behringer UCA 202) you can get for EUR 19 total.


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