It is, indeed, a Boss DAC. (80s slang, for you young'uns.) Have listened for several hours, across the ridiculous range of music I listen to - from string quartets to bluegrass to Mongolian throat singing - and I'm VERY happy with the sound. I've got a couple VERY old digital network players (from Logitech) and this is head and shoulders above all but one of them, and that one cost a couple thousand dollars back in the day. As good sounding as a network DAC I got last year that cost about 6x the price of this board plus a Pi. Using Ropieee for the software build, since I'm a Roon user.
Not without pain getting there, however. Part of the pain came from the Pi picked up in a separate drop here. Struggled to get the music player image loaded, and decided I got a bad micro SD card in that drop. But in the process of working that out, I saw another problem that shows up all over the web, which is an under-voltage error message that scrolled by during startup when I was connecting the power to the Pi. Allo has in many places said that's just not possible, but I've got screen shots showing it (as have others... but were still told it's not possible.) Powering the setup via the Allo's USB C also generated the message, but shortly after another message that power had stabilized.
The USB C port isn't very tight. Isn't holding the plug in, and since that's the power source now, it's a bit annoying to have a snip of duct tape as part of my otherwise lovely build. Pro tip: After listening for an hour or so, I ditched the power adapter that came with the Pi for an iFi low noise power adapter, and just as they have in every other digital audio device I've used them on, it significantly improved the sound. (Got the same under power message no matter which adapter...)
So I strongly recommend this DAC board. Heck of a great price, punches well over it's weight in sound quality. The error message isn't worth knocking off a star, but to someone who spent much of his life watching those boot and kernel messages for a living, it doesn't make me terribly happy.
Not without pain getting there, however. Part of the pain came from the Pi picked up in a separate drop here. Struggled to get the music player image loaded, and decided I got a bad micro SD card in that drop. But in the process of working that out, I saw another problem that shows up all over the web, which is an under-voltage error message that scrolled by during startup when I was connecting the power to the Pi. Allo has in many places said that's just not possible, but I've got screen shots showing it (as have others... but were still told it's not possible.) Powering the setup via the Allo's USB C also generated the message, but shortly after another message that power had stabilized.
The USB C port isn't very tight. Isn't holding the plug in, and since that's the power source now, it's a bit annoying to have a snip of duct tape as part of my otherwise lovely build. Pro tip: After listening for an hour or so, I ditched the power adapter that came with the Pi for an iFi low noise power adapter, and just as they have in every other digital audio device I've used them on, it significantly improved the sound. (Got the same under power message no matter which adapter...)
So I strongly recommend this DAC board. Heck of a great price, punches well over it's weight in sound quality. The error message isn't worth knocking off a star, but to someone who spent much of his life watching those boot and kernel messages for a living, it doesn't make me terribly happy.