I've gone analog out and it's always trouble. There's a hiss or a hum or a full-on ground loop. I enjoy optical spdif and think it should be more prevalent. The other possibility is USB-audio but then you have to deal with drivers.
Yeah, I was looking into a sound card for different reasons and the "modern" sound cards are all garbage. Terrible CODECs and OpAmps, combined with poor circuit design that drives them out-of-spec.
SPDIF out of the computer and into even a half-way decent DAC seems to be the way to go. Plus if you have more than one source you save money, since you only need to buy the DAC once.
When I say sound card I’m talking about an “audio interface” which is indeed digitally connected via usb or similar (see focusrite, zoom, tascam, behringer for lower cost interfaces) and provides a balanced TRS output for a powered monitor.
Also have a look at “class compliant” audio interfaces. I haven't needed drivers in the better part of a decade, and most interfaces now are even compatible with iOS using a camera connection kit.
Quick question, does the DAC still work when connected to hdmi monitors? I keep having to fiddle with pulse audio at every login to get the headphone jack on my NUC to work.
Works fine for me. As in, I set it to usb audio and it keeps the setting after I restart the computer or resume from suspend. Sometimes I want HDMI audio and then I switch the output using the Gnome volume app and that works as well.
If it's a PulseAudio issue, it's very likely that you can change something in a config file somewhere to change the behaviour to whatever you want.
I recently switched from pulse/alsa to Pipewire with the Pulse shim, working pretty well so far. I don't have any reason in particular to think that Pipewire would help, ... but sometimes changing random stuff solves the problem without needing to get into diagnosis.
