Well… When Audioquest tells me to jump, I’d rather duck…
I use the dongle that Jim posted downstairs. I swapped them around a bit on the LSX setup when installing the Douk box, but couldn’t hear a bit of difference.
As for the cabling – since iOS devices are the only real solution for Apple Music to have your cake and eat it too (ie. have auto switching and play lossless/highres), these are fun setups until Apple get their act together and whip up a network transportable option (or at least make macOS app have exclusive access to the audio device so it can so autoswitching). Knowing them, this could take a while. In the mean time I am controlling AM on the tied down iPhone via my Watch – which works surprisingly well.
So for now, these nice little horrible cabled-up iOS setups work fine and sound well eh… pretty great actually. A man needs options.
It’s spielerei, mostly. Running Spotify through HQPlayer, using Camera Connection Kits on iDevices – all good fun. And yes, one needs an alternative for on-the-go. Still.
I was talking about the wifi chip of the Pi not the usb ports. The wifi causes a lot of noise if activated but its not audible besides on very sensetive iems in my case. I am sorry if I didnt make the clear in my first post.
Same for me… Roon, Apple Music, Audirvana 3.5, HQPlayer on my Air M1. My Mac MIni core only runs Roon for my stereo setup. My M1 is for my desk and headphone use… I love to have options and play around.
well, there could be a reason, why Sonore is using Shairport i am happy with Shairport running on little Pi…Still waiting for my Toslink Hat. But it is on the way already (Anyway this little guy seems to be a very nice one…lol…Sonore - microRendu v1.5 )
They popularised rather than created them, I had had two before the iPods ever came out.
I will say with the Nano models in particular they moved things up in the market considerably. But without the iPod brand I do not think they would have taken off like they did.
And even with Lossless they could have gone down the FLAC route but had to make their own version that was not adopted anywhere else for a long time. As someone that has owned Apple equipment for around 20 years some of their walled garden thinking annoys me enough that I do not use their services on their products.
But Apple TV, an area that they have to go outside their walled garden (and Apple Music) are both good services, because they cannot afford to drive lock-in and because of that they build better services.
There are lots of reason I could say even more than https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-reason-some-companies-do-not-support-FLAC-in-their-audio-products why they wouldn’t use FLAC. Somebody seem to sue them for use of anything, why not have ALAC to avoid just that.
Popularised? Why nobody managed to do it before them? Mini disk players were the hight of imagination, I still have one in my drawer.
It is like people saying - “I can paint like Jackson Pollock”, but only he managed to do it, even everyone can, every child had done it before him, and will do it for ever after.
I owned Apple things for 30 years, along with all kinds of Unixes, Windows Androids. Everything has its uses. Everything sucks in some aspect, some more than others.
Apple also popularized GUI, that Xerox “invented” and Micro$oft just managed to make a really bad copy off.
Without Apple our digital audio would at best be like Sonos, which was pretty good, just not as good as iTunes. Android would be like Blackberry and we’d have M$ Windows XXII. Roon? not sure it would be as good either.
I had two wonderful Sony minidisk player’s and they were great until the iPod Nano came along, and that blew everything else out of the water. I also had a couple of hard disk players before iPod came along, but they were not as good as the iPod.
Not sure why anyone could sue them for Flac as it was open source and they seemed to copy a lot from it.
I am also sadly old enough and used the first Colour Macs in university and currently have pretty much everything in my house as I like cross platform environments. Window’s was a poor immiation for many years, but thankfully they are now two mature platforms that are quite different and I use both.
Apple trends to create good things and becomes lazy, so unless they have constant push from the competition they tend to sit on what they have and only develop very slowly.
I moved to Android after the iphone 5 and now keep both and thankfully iMessage is not a thing in Europe so I don’t have to care about lock-in
As I said earlier I think some of Apple’s best software development is coming off their platform, and I see that as a good thing.
It’s also got really good on Android, where it was not a popular starter as Spotify is totally dominant. But that has made Apple work much harder and that is great for the whole streaming world
maybe should try 512 
)
I love this Appliance 
i am happy with Shairport running on little Pi…Still waiting for my Toslink Hat. But it is on the way already 
(Anyway this little guy seems to be a very nice one…lol…