During last weekend I spent quite a lot of time on getting digione and usbridge working. I installed dietpi on both but it took some time to figure out various features of dietpi. I installed sqeezebox server, sqeezlite player & share port sync and finally got both of them working. :yahoo:
Started with digione first and some random mix tracks from ripped CDs of lagaan, devdas, Vicky donor & hotel california. With digione the improvement was very easily noticable its the most refined and natural pleasing sound I heard from my system.
I had tried various softwares moode, rune audio, volumio. Recently, I was using my HP laptop with daphile on it. But, none of them gave so much clarity and pleasing music.
I kept on listening and trying random songs and everything was better. There was very natural smoothness around each sound and every instrument was more separated and noticable. Even the old songs downloaded from saregama which never sounded good to me were enjoyable.
I also have ?igi+ which I used for time and now lying unused because usb input from daphile on my laptop is much better. But, digione sounds much better and natural than my daphile laptop.
I tried usbridge also and kept on switching between digione and usbridge, it sounded almost same as digione. I had set the cpu governer to max frequency because this setting on daphile seems to make a positive difference. But, sparky with usbridge gets more heated than pi with digione. CPU was 61 degrees while on pi it was around 48 without heat sinks.
24/192 recording of hotel California seemed better in usbridge but overall i felt digione had more open sound. I guess changes might be because of usb and spdif reciever implementations inside dac.
I exchanged few mails with maker of dac Kingwa about it.
usb reciever on my dac is not very latest but no external spdif reciever is used, es9018 uses spdif as native input so there is no additional processing involved.
This might result in some very slight difference I hear between two. But I am not sure about it might just be my perception.
