Yeah, I was looking into a sound card for different reasons and the "modern" sound cards are all garbage. Terrible CODECs and OpAmps, combined with poor circuit design that drives them out-of-spec.

SPDIF out of the computer and into even a half-way decent DAC seems to be the way to go. Plus if you have more than one source you save money, since you only need to buy the DAC once.

I have a schiit dac and it has optical, spdif a and usb. Honestly it would be cool if it had two of each.

When I say sound card I’m talking about an “audio interface” which is indeed digitally connected via usb or similar (see focusrite, zoom, tascam, behringer for lower cost interfaces) and provides a balanced TRS output for a powered monitor.

Also have a look at “class compliant” audio interfaces. I haven't needed drivers in the better part of a decade, and most interfaces now are even compatible with iOS using a camera connection kit.

> then you have to deal with drivers.

I've been using USB DAC on Linux for years, always worked out of the box.

Quick question, does the DAC still work when connected to hdmi monitors? I keep having to fiddle with pulse audio at every login to get the headphone jack on my NUC to work.

Works fine for me. As in, I set it to usb audio and it keeps the setting after I restart the computer or resume from suspend. Sometimes I want HDMI audio and then I switch the output using the Gnome volume app and that works as well.

If it's a PulseAudio issue, it's very likely that you can change something in a config file somewhere to change the behaviour to whatever you want.

Dunno, never connected it to HDMI.

I recently switched from pulse/alsa to Pipewire with the Pulse shim, working pretty well so far. I don't have any reason in particular to think that Pipewire would help, ... but sometimes changing random stuff solves the problem without needing to get into diagnosis.

An audio interface (preferably external) + speakers that support balanced cables should eliminate group loops / hum.