A few years ago I started using an older Mac Mini as an HTPC computer with great success. It had all our films, music, pictures and home videos. A year ago that processor died, and I got a new Mini. This sucked. It was slow, cantankerous, video was jerky and sound was not up to par.
This time I wanted to build a unit that was bulletproof, reliable, expandable and FAST. The build started with a Silverstone HTPC case that could hold the motherboard and up to 12 SATA drives. I only use 4 spots, but have plenty of room to expand. The MB is a low end gaming board that has a claim of an excellent audio section. The processor is an AMD Ryzen 4 core at 3ghz. 16GB of Ram 12TB of disk, and a very fast SSD for the boot drive. The OS is Ubuntu 19.04.
One of the issues with the Mac is that it could only support optical digital out. That is a noisy and jittery method of sending a digital signal because there is no way to clock it. My research said the USB output would be better because it is clocked at the source. Unfortunately, my DAC was too old to handle the USB input directly, so I found the Schiit Audio Eitr that sends a coax SP/DIF signal to the DAC. Ubuntu has some configuration issues with it, but after a bit of experimentation and coding, I got it to work at all sample rates and bit depths, WOW what a difference. The sound is more focused, detailed and smooth. The sound stage is absolutely stable, and the grittiness is gone.
I can now run Kodi, and several background tasks, and the system handles it perfectly. Love the new system.
