Curious to why native 24 bit is so important, in particular on a portable device...
Here's some reading for OP, before he answers among the lines of 24>16...
(REMOVED LINKS)
As for mobile devices, I was able to playback FLAC even on the galaxy s2
BoredSysAdmin, thank you for the links. I perused through them.
My father and uncles are really the audiophiles in my family. My dad has setup a listening room in his home. Hasn't done room treatments and such, but he often listens to Vinyl and CDs. He has several tube driven amps and pre-amps, along with some good quality solid state amps.
We often go out to the desert several times a year and camping trips. We would like something that has the convenience of a DAP, but provides better quality. This could just mean FLAC rips of CDs rather than lossy MP3s. I just know they hate listening to music off my phone.
So, I was looking at a way to play back higher quality sound from a portable device.
I also recognize that the specific album makes a huge difference due to the "loudness war". I have run my library through the Dynamic Range plugin for Foobar and it is amazing to see the trend of low DR scores for albums in the late 90's and early 2000's compared to 80's and early 90's. It could be that getting a recording that has not been mastered with too much compressed dynamic range is the answer, combined with a lossless codec (like FLAC or ALAC).
Regardless, I am going to likely take a look at combining a Raspberry Pi with a board from HiFiBerry to see how it works. My understanding is that I can set the RPi to act as a WiFi hotspot that my phone can connect to and control even if I am somewhere without WiFi (such as in the desert or camping).
Any recommendations on the DAC to combine with the RPi? Is the one from HiFiBerry good? Or should I look at others?
I would like something that could reasonably compete against Vinyl or Reel-to-Reel when played on higher end audio gear, assuming that the FLAC files come from sources that have been mastered well.
