I’ve got a Sony PHA-1 portable amp, and the thing doubles as an external sound card. Most of the time it’s hooked up to my laptop so I don’t have to put up with the nasty electrical noise coming out of the laptop’s own output. It does that job well, and in DAC mode Linux picks it up as a separate sound card without any fuss, so I never bothered looking into it. Today I was bored and flipped through the manual, and found an explanation of how the PHA-1 is used under Mac OSX. It’s in Japanese but I could follow it — turns out after it’s recognized you still need to set the frequency to 96Hz. I knew where that option was back when I was using the PHA-1 with a Surface Pro 3, so… does Linux have one? Checked the manual, and sure enough it does. I haven’t touched ALSA much lately; these days it’s mostly PulseAudio.