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One of the advantages of toslink is galvanic isolation. Are you having issues with noise from the chromacast?
Decent DAC's have improvement in several areas, low electrical noise on inputs, accuracy in the conversion, quality output amplification.
All of these things are noticeable in a critical listening situation but are just 'flavour' in more ambient listening setups. What kind of listening are you doing?
Airhead-
Mixture of stuff really - R6 streaming a lot of the time, some stuff from mixcloud & a ton of cds I had burned to Google Play Music before that was all posted across to YT, mainly disco / soul / electronic stuff.
I couldn't tell you the bitrate quality of half of it, I can definitely hear differences in quality from some mixes I listen to but that's probably not going to improve with hardware upgrades! Just curious if a magic £50 Chinese DAC will make it "better" or just different, definitely more ambient listening than searching for every last detail in particular recordings.
mcJ78
Back on DAC chat - i'm finding myself mainly streaming stuff via chromacast audio & wondering if any of the cheap DACs will give me a noticeable increase in sound quality if I use the mini toslink output > DAC > amp?
My amp (cambridge axa35) doesn't have digital inputs or an onboard DAC, so i'm stuck with the analogue input - unless I chop the amp in for something that has a good DAC onboard instead of buying a separate one... thoughts?