That sounds interesting; can you give me some info about that?
Not a real expert on digital playback, but just going by actual experience was that my windows desktop machine gave my DAC's fits and I had to do something. I went through a couple different filters with varying degrees of success but never 100% satisfied. The issues I had with playing music through my Windows machine were, faint, or not so faint buzzing that seemed to coincide with the flickering of the processor light. That was mostly remedied by fiddling with the power options in control panel, going to power saver mode. Then of course a reboot was usually required. Then occasionally the music would play just slightly too fast. It wasn't entirely obvious for the first minute or so until I would notice (usually vocals would be too high pitched). Another reboot, and waiting for everything to come back up. Another was a very rapid fire cutting out of the music, also not immediately noticed but within 20 seconds it would be obvious something was way wrong, and again a reboot was required.
I got tired of it, The rebooting is a PITA, especially after a DAC upgrade to the Modi Multibit was also having similar issues. I became interested in other alternatives to the Windows platform. Apple had glowing reports, but the price tag was too much. Other solutions seemed to be beyond what I wanted to invest, both in time and resources. Since I am a JRiver fan, when they introduced the new ID for the Raspberry PI3 package for around $40 last fall I bit and ordered it, and a Raspberry from Amazon for $50. A little Cat5, a Netgear switch and I was in business.
What you get for the JRiver ID is the Linux operating system and a Linux version of JRiver that comes on a micro SD card. The Raspberry only has limited ram (1GB I think) and no storage on board so I needed to keep all my music files on a separate drive. My music still resides on my Windows PC for now until I invest in a NAD or some other external drive. How it works on my system is I use the Raspberry exclusively for playback with the Modi MB, but I push (stream) the music files from my PC. This way I can use the main JRiver windows version for all the things like selecting, creating playlists or whatnot right on my PC screen (actually I use my TV for that while in my listening chair). The Raspberry plays the music sent to it via Ethernet cable (galvanically isolated) and since the RPi has no fan, no spinning hard drive, and wireless devices are not in use it is very quiet in the disturbances that can and often do make problems for DAC's, in particular USB DAC's.
The Raspberry just stays on 24/7 (usually for months) always at the ready and uses something like 4 watts of power. It never stalls, hiccups, drops out etc even on hi rez files. And the sound I feel is very much superior to what I was getting from the same DAC running direct from my Win machine. BTW I was running Win in WASAP so it shouldn't have been messing with the data stream.
This JRiver solution is likely not for everyone. Many use the Raspberry with other software solutions, or create their own. But the advantages for me were that since I have been a regular user of JRiver already and that they came out with a mostly plug and play solution that interfaces nicely with the program I already have (although the Linux JR version works fine by itself) and the fact that JRiver maintains my Raspberry with regular free updates it was a very easy choice, and one I have never regretted.
