Is there any DAC compatible with FreeBSD?

Personally if I was going to spend some money on one I might get this Naim dac. Unfortunately it is also out of production, so they are hard to find now. Their kit is high quality though. Made in Salisbury, about 15 miles from where I'm sitting, top build quality of course.
www.audiovenue.uk

Naim Audio DAC - Audio Venue

DAC
www.audiovenue.uk www.audiovenue.uk
Naim don't appear to be selling a standalone dac now, only a "streaming preamp", I'm not sure where that fits. Which is a bit of a shame. I think Sugden's might have a standalone dac, they also make high quality kit.
Cambridge used to make their stuff in England, but they are mostly a design and marketing house now, their production is all in China.
 
This is the Cambridge 200M board. Mostly surface mount, typical high density mass-produced electronics.
From the review here https://www.on-mag.fr/index.php/top...li-casque-haut-de-gamme-totalement-consensuel
they gave it 5 stars. I'm sure it's pretty good.

I can see it has the XMOS usb interface chip. Seems to be a decent amount of power supply smoothing, although they are powering it from a crappy switch mode wall wart which is one place where they are saving money. The headphone amp might be op-amps with some small signal driver transistors down in the bottom right corner, if you look just to the left of headphone socket there is a small upright silver headsink what what looks like a pair of transistors mounted on it... I can't quite make it out in this photo, anyway my guess is that's the headphone amp. There's an ARM processor running the control system and user interface. Quite a complicated design, microprocessor controlled. It's probably an upgrade of the dacmagic plus to use the ESS chips in place of the wolfsons. The two ESS chips are visible about mid-way down the board on the right hand side, the 'ESS' logo is just barely legible on the back of the two chips. So there's an input section in the upper left, power supply smoothing at upper right with the dac section beneath it, the audio amp at bottom right, and I believe the audio amp has its own separate regulated split-rail power supply at bottom mid-left, you can see two TO-220 packages that are probably linear voltage regulators. At least, that's my guess. 😁 And the volume pot and indicators are all at the front. It looks quite well made. Any repairs are likely to need surface mount rework though, by the looks of things.

1791890091508.png
 
Whereas this older Naim dac has a high quality linear regulated PSU with toroidal transformer built-in, it appears to be mostly a through-hole construction pcb although it looks like some of the chips
are surface mount, so it looks like they have been moving in that direction. This one used burr-brown R2R dac chips. Looks like it has discrete transistor output stages, and probably some post-dac analog filters, down the left hand side, for all the outputs at upper left. It's a different beast altogether, really. Of course the Cambridge one with more modern technology may sound just as good, I haven't listened to either of them. For build and components quality I would take the Naim of course, but it probably cost a lot more than the Cambridge when it was new. Of course the Naim box is probably 3 to 4 times the size of the cambridge one.
1791891805655.png
 
Yes, that Naim dac was an expensive piece of kit when it was new, this says it was 2100 GBP, and you could also buy an add-on PSU for another 5000 GBP! One in good condition today will still probably cost more than that Cambridge unit. Oh well, it's just for interest. :-)

I'm sure there are lots of other good dacs out there as well.
 
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