Don’t get too balled up about NUC fan noise. I had mine in my listening room and only heard the fan when it was analyzing newly added tracks. Other than that, it was pretty inaudible. I would definitely try it before investing in a fanless case.
i want to confirm Danijels suggestion not to plug in the DAC directly to the NUC.
I first had connected my NUC directly to my Chord Hugo TT2 - it sounded very good. But when I added an Aries G2.1 streaming bridge, the sound was on a total different level. The reason is an extremely noisy USB port. I have seen in the Show-off area great and expensive DACs connected directly. You are wasting a lot of money! Please borrow a streamer/bridge to verify this, you will not regret it! Promised!
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Just a little addition, I also use Rose Audio 201 and Cambridge Audio Edge NQ as endpoints. Both of them work noticeably worse connected directly.
In the main system, there is no streamer of any kind and that is the reason why there is a Raspberry 4 based endpoint.