I needed a low budget but good sounding DAC for my garage/workshop. It had to connect to my network drive where I keep my music collection. I didn't want to spend a lot of money so I set a budget of $100. I'm one of those kind of people that tries to squeeze out the best bang for the buck. I've been real happy with the Allo BOSS setup in my office and the Allo DigiOne Signature transport in my main system. Neither of those would fit my budget but I wanted to stick with Allo if possible. That's where the Allo MiniBoss comes in. At just $39 it's a fraction of it's big brother's price tag. And it operates in I2S Master mode like the full sized BOSS as well. The next thing to sort out was which Raspberry Pi I was going to use. The MiniBOSS was made to work with a Pi Zero (although it will work with any Raspberry Pi). I've always shied away from the Zero for any of my projects in the past because of it's single core processor limitation. That limitation was eliminated recently when the Raspberry Pi Foundation upgraded the zero to a much faster quad core processor. And they kept the price at just $15, yay! So here is the breakdown of what I wound up with.
$39 MiniBoss for RPI Zero
$15 Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W
$12 Case
$20 Linear PS with micro USB adapter
$0 MoOde Audio software
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$86 Total
I already had a MicroSD card so I didn't include that in the price breakdown but even if I had to buy one I still would have come in under budget.
I'm floored by how good this DAC sounds. The design team at Allo did a fantastic job as always. It rates very highly on my "bang for the buck" list.
I know the question, "Where can you get a LPS for $20?" will probably come up. So here are the details. It works quite well and sounds much better than a switching power supply. I'm probably pushing the 1A maximum a bit but the PS is only warm after streaming all day. I may get curious one day and measure it.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00B88EP1I/ref=ox_sc_act_title_2?smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&psc=1https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01G6EBGWO/ref=crt_ewc_title_srh_2?ie=UTF8&smid=A21QX3PEKSFI3Z&th=1
