Hi all!
Ok, so after a long time of looking at this cool stuff and not being able to come up with anything to do with it, I've finally hit on a project which seems perfect for something like a Raspberry Pi, and am eager to order up stuff and get started, only to find out that I've apparently picked the one area that the Pi apparently just doesn't really do very well.
Brief summary: I want to build something that takes a stereo line-level audio input, performs some digital processing on it, and feeds it back out as a stereo line-level output. I don't need anything terribly fancy, just basic unamplified CD-quality analog stereo in/out..
So after reading a bit, I discover that the Pi onboard audio output isn't very good, and it's onboard audio input is, well, apparently there just isn't one. Ok, fair enough, lots of people just suggest plugging in a USB audio adapter, which aren't hard to come by, and they don't cost a lot, so I look into getting one of those and discover that pretty much all of them only have mono mic inputs, no stereo line-in capability (I found a couple that did, but they cost as much as the Pi itself, and were about twice the physical size, and at that point I might as well just get a cheap mini-ITX motherboard with onboard audio). I also looked at the HiFiBerry DAC, but despite being pretty pricey, as best I can tell it doesn't actually have any input capabilities at all (so is actually worse for my purpose than a $2 USB adapter).
At this point it looks like the one thing that might work is the Cirrus Logic card? It really seems like overkill, and costs more than the Raspberry Pi itself(!), but at least it has a line-input jack..
Am I missing something, or is this really my only option?
Alternately, are there any other SBCs in the same general power/size/price ballpark to the Raspberry Pi which have better onboard audio capabilities I could look at?
