Seeking lower cost alternatives to Berkeley Audio Design Alpha USB converter

A network bridge may be what you are looking for. Ethernet is inherently low noise and is the best way to get bits from a computer to a DAC. I have a Pi2AES on a Raspberry Pi which produces very low levels of both noise and jitter, spanking much more expensive DDCs.
This may be useful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jvu_doQfAI0&t=152s&ab_channel=GoldenSound

I’m going just to use RCA SPIDIF from the Pi2AES to my DAC. I should have my Cable in a day or two.

I’m building a SV-EQ1616D phono equalizer for my SKY 20, from Bob’s Devices, right now, because the damn Area II is kicking my analog’s butt right now. ;)

The output of your PC, via Ethernet, goes to the Raspberry Pi , which uses the Pi2AES to reclock and generate clean digital streams from the bits, that came over the Ethernet port.

It uses your PC and the Pi, this way, to feed your DAC this rather nice stream, rather than the much noisier USB stream which the DAC has to deal with normally.

You can if you want just hook a USB drive to the Pi and eliminate the PC entirely, but you will need a different OS on the Pi to handle that kind of setup.

I dunno. The Pi2AES guy recommends RoPieee which runs headless, meaning no interface.

As I have not got my cable yet I have not set it up and figured it out. For me it should just be UPnP DLNA used with Foobar, or that is my intention anyway.

I don’t stream stuff, I just need to get my files off my NVMe drive, through the Pi Bridge, to the Pi2AES, which normally outputs on all outputs, to my DAC.

I have not seen detailed instructions but I was a Linux sysadmin for some years, so I expect I can get it all to do what I want. As I have not yet, I have no real useful advice, outside of searching. I did not look very hard once I figured out what was going on.

You could email the guy at Pi2AES and ask, he might have a good idea where to look for good instructions. I’ll know in a week or so, at present mail pace. ;(

The hardest part so far has been Win 10 networking. I had to find just the right Intel driver, and I have to trick that into giving me what I want.

I should fire up a Slackware partition. It would be easier to network, certainly. ;)
Been playing games, and only installed the dose on my new machine. ;)