I bought the Digione SignaturePlayer about a year and it's based on the v3 of the pi
hardware. I've been very happy with it. I have it setup as a streamer into my
pre-amp's digital input (via coax). I'll upgrade to a better, separate DAC at a
later stage.
Setup was easy, burn an image to a card and install the card into the slot ( a pair
of needle nose pliers is handy to install/swap the micro SD cards ). Each piece of
software has instructions on how to do setup. Just point a web browser at the pi
and follow the directions. I have mine setup on the LAN and use a DHCP reservation
so I get the same IP all the time.
The pi mounts my local NAS to play back 24/96 files into the system. Don't skimp on
read buffers and you'll be fine. I see to recall one piece of software needing an
samba option specified to mount the NAS. Like version=3.0 for CIFS or something
like that. It was the only real snag in getting the NAS mounted.
I sit on the couch and browse to the pi's website on my tablet.
click click click - easy!
I've tried several pieces of software on the pi over the past year or so. I started
with Moode and was fairly happy with it until I tried Volumio. Volumio is a sexier
interface. Thus far I haven't found the need for the paid version.
I tried Max2Play and could never get the "better" website interface working. The
basic one was too crude and I didn't feel like burning time trying to figure it
out. After all it's a paid beast.
I tried Roon and the pi worked well. Just install Ropiee (something like that) and
give it about 5 mins to initialize. Blammo roon saw it and I was rocking. I found
roon to be too expensive for me. If roon did everything I wanted it to do, I would
have paid. But I was looking for a little more control and it completely sucked when
it came to interfacing with my Sonos speakers. They choked constantly. Not gonna pay
to gain a headache.
I tried Audiovarna (something like that) on my Win10 PC and it found the pi (running
volumio) automatically. It seemed to work well, but ultimately counter productive. I
don't want to sit at my pc to push sound to the pi. I want to sit on the couch and
have the pi pull songs. The PC was mounting the same NAS drive for sound files - so
the extra stop at the PC made no sense.
So currently I've settled on Volumio and I'm working my way thru my library doing
some tag cleanup.
tl;dr the pi is great!
ps. this other thread came up when browsing yours
https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/is-the-raspberry-pi-with-allo-digione-the-ideal-spdif-transpo...