Digital Upgrade Recommendations

b, then a...

a+b best, makes c redundant

network acoustics eno = uptone etherregen

@tom2441

i apologize, i was wrong, i misread your op, misunderstood your setup and assumed it is like mine

in your case, i do think that of the 3 choices you gave, you should get the ddc gaia and use i2s into the pontus - i had that set up, it worked well, improved the bass and imaging of the pontus somewhat, my pontus was fed by a bluesound node streamer as roon endpoint at that point

that said, @sonic79’s suggestion below is superior - don’t use the core machine as an end point at all, just have it do the processing/computing, data/file management, traffic flow - and then have an outboard streamer endpoint that is fully isolated via optical (sonore opticalrendu w lps, or equivalent - this provides the most effective isolation, better than the gaia’s electrical isolation) -- and then take the music stream from the opticalrendu into the pontus via its super clean usb output (this method is noticeably the superior to having the gaia take a very noisy feed from the core machine, then only partially cleaning it into the pontus - i tried it, sold the gaia, i determined the optical isolation was most effective, produced the most easeful sound)

in the way of explanation for my error, in my current case, i use a weiss dac501 -- this works as an endpoint with dac, it takes the ethernet feed from my dedicated core -- in this case, i chose use the uptone etheregen to clean/isolate the ethernet feed into the weiss, and the weiss does the rest

hope this explanation is clear, sorry for the confusion

yes i did have the etherregen at the time

i agree again w @sonic79 - not a great idea to take the usb feed off the core machine motherboard... that is a noisy noisy spot and the noise is generated in that machine, so putting an etheregen upstream of that machine doesn’t address that noise

what we are trying to do here is fully galvanically isolate/eliminate digital noise at the point where the music bitstream is being sent to the dac... 

one thing is definitely true, you start down this path, you do end up with lots of little boxes, cables, extra power supplies...  that aspect bugs me, but hey, at least at present, this is the drill to get the sound to be really really good...