If you’re running usb out of a computer there’s a possibility that power might be running through also and that can add a bunch of noise, but if you’re running out of a streamer that’s set up for using usb as it’s preferred output like Aurender, the signal will be a lot cleaner before it hits the DAC.
Streamer output options
In my younger days, I was told so often that spdif was better than usb that it became doctrine. I'm in the market for a 2k$ish streamer and I see many higher end streamers with usb outputs that pass far higher res data than the spdif 192/24 does. My DAC takes either, but not i2s. Are the new implementations of usb now better than spdif?