How good is the audio on a Pi?

[alanwalker]

Hii...



I've had a Pi 2 knocking around for a while and today I've finally decided to run MusicBox on it.



I'm planning to run this via HDMI to RCA cable (or USB to RCA) into my Alpine car stereo and might buy an amp for the Alpine. I currently run a NUC with W10 via headphone jack to RCA and the audio is perfectly acceptable (the RCA actually goes via an Alpine Ai-net box before the head unit).



I'm interested to know what the digital audio is like from the Pi. I figured if it's digital, it's digital, you can't lose audio quality like you can analogue, but the signal will be going from digital to analogue via the hdmi to rca cable, so any degradation in audio will come from the cable, not the Pi itself, no? Unless there is some other interference that the Pi is known for?



I was asking because I've seen a number of DAC devices for the Pi and wondered if these are necessary because the Pi has bad audio?




Thanks..!



I didn't find the right solution from the Internet.



References:-
www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=198953&sid=d7203fd93ed7c40c2c94fe88b930d976


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