XMOS ES9023 DAC or I2S DAC with Raspberry Pi

[nimo]

Hi,

I am trying to placen what hw to use for a perhaps future vlumio based music player. As my budget are pretty low I am planning to go with a Raspberry Pi and after reading up some I concluded I wanted this DAC: ebay.com/itm/141021544210 (XMOS ES9023 Asynchronous DAC Decoder USB to Optical Coaxial 384K 32Bit Weiliang).

I also see the flexibility to be able to keep the DAC (as it is USB based and not I2S based) if I upgraded the Raspberry Pi to another solution in the future.

But now I read at list-i2s-dacs-for-raspberry-t1103.html :

2S is definitely the way to go if you have a Raspberry Pi. No more stuttering, better sound quality (in theory) and free up a USB port!

Will a I2S based DAC really give better sound then the USB DAC linked above?

Any other suggestions?

Best regards

[AudiophilePi]

I have a I2S DAC on the RPi and it doesn’t sound at all so well as my CD player.

[ralfnap]

I have the RPI-DAC http://www.tjaekel.com/T-DAC/raspi.html and it sounds much better than the HifiBerry and even better than my DragonFly 1.2 USB Dac.