ES9023 or PCM5102A for a RPi Zero low budget 'hifi' version?

[vulpes]

Hi *,

I have also posted this question at the volumio forum and hope its okay to repost it here
to get some more replies for a better decision, well I just hope so.

I would like to build a students low budget 'hifi player' based on the
raspberry pi zero. There are a lot of different DACs with different
options available, but I couldn't really find any distortion/noise measurements for
different DACs.

Now I wonder myself, if it would be better to buy a ES9023 based solution with a
MCLK and a Ultra-low-noise LDO with 11.5µVRMS like the SabreBerry Zero:




Or if would be better to get a PCM5102A based solution (without a LDO and without
a MCLK?) like the Phat DAC:





As some people stated that a ES9023 DAC with a master clock seems to sound
worse (because of noisy mclk?) than a PCM5102A based DAC.

My listening equipment is a Objective2 headphone amp with Beyerdynamics DT880
Edition and Yamaha HS80M active speaker. Most of my music collection is usually at 16/44,1kHz.
The Raspberry Zero will also be equiped with a WIFI Adapter, OLED-Screen and a infrared sensor.

Maybe someone can give me an advice, as I am not really sure which of the stated DACs
(or maybe another DAC?) _most likely_ will be the 'better' solution.
I am aware of the fact, that listening experience is very subjective, though.
Will there be a hearable difference between those DACs, using my equipment, at all?

Many thanks,
vulpes

[Starkgene]

Hi,
I've just finished my project using osmc and volumio to make PCM5102 work with my Raspberry Pi 3. I chose the HifiBerry DAC profile in the settings. Perhaps you will need to connect SCK to GND if you want to make the module work with your Pi Zero W.


Jeff Stark

[Starkgene]

Here's the example:

[gearhead]

IMO (YMMV) do not get a 5102. If you get a burr brown based card, you want one with a 5122 so you can use hardware volume control. Onboard clocks are nice if you can get them for the price you are looking to pay, but I do not know what is out there, now. If you have nice headphones and intend to adjust volume with Rune, you will appreciate the hardware volume. If it is hard wired to 100% volume and you are using an external volume on the amp it may not be so critical to have hardware volume control, but the 5122 is a better sounding chip, IMO.

I've never used an ESS chip, so cannot comment on it.