Stan,

If you look at the people on this forum, and others, quite a few people are fronting their Beresford DACs (especially the SEG) with Raspberry Pis fitted with a board to generate SPDIF. If you could take the essentials of the SEG or other DACs and create a board to fit the RPI with its HAT connector then you could be on to winner.

There are of course a lot of people now making DACs for the RPI and they are starting to creep upwards in sophistication and price.

A lot of the manufacturers are sticking to the same small footprint and therefore their DACs become 2 or 3 boards high which would include a power-supply plus other bits.

It might make sense to see how small you could make the SEG without having to worry about inputs (you get that from the Pi I2S pins), outputs would be RCAs and you would probably need 5volts input.

I do not know whether people would want headphone output - in my opinion you would need a fair amount of power to do that properly.

So a lot to think about.

I shall do a case study. What I can say is that looking at what is on the market right now, most of these companies have just slapped a bunch of components on a PCB and hoped for the best.

There are one or two which are pretty passable and a couple more due in the not too distant future, the question is in real terms what is really possible in that type of space and sat on top of a processor which is not emi RFI optimised . Again power supplies to the units etc

A suggestion would be to mount the two sepertaly in a custom enclosure that is designed to compliment the design, oh wait could that be a streamer?

The SEG for the money is good Stan it can be improved quite markedly as well by a few updates and circuit layout changes but it is still two boxes, 3 if you take an off board psu

My suggestion would be rather than looking for a sticking plaster solution fix the root problem

Then you gave to weigh up cost of R&D v's potential RRP the pi route is really designed for diy guys and young kids looking to start electronics projects for the first time

The market will settle down and the next latest fad will take over as forums promote what tickles a particular fancy imho

intetesting times uber mass market with ultra thin margins in relation to the cost means thousands of units gave to be sold to make a reasonable living and the hassle that entails with no tech guts playing with rhem

just a few thoughts, look at how many people who gave actually purchased these things and reverse the figures then assertsin whether it is worth the effirt

I agree with the above views.

Another way of cracking it could be to make a SEG-streamer. By that, I mean integrate a Pi (or even Pi Zero) into a slightly larger case, take the I2S output from the Pi and use your reclocking skills to make it as rock stable as you can. Beef up the PSU to feed the Pi with isolated 5V, add some supercappery, licence some software like Volumio and you have a streamer-in-a-box.

Those are all very good ideas. But what interests me in the idea of a Pi board is that the DAC chip that I use has several advanced functions that can only be accessed via I2C. In the case of expansion, the Pi can accept touch screen displays etc. But to get the best out of a DAC PCB mounted on a Pi would require a separate PSU. Using the same PSU to power everything is adding to the noise. On top of that the Pi PSU is 5V. To have a discrete output stage would require at least 12V for the best dynamic range.

It's not impossible.