Is USB audio dying?

It makes sense from a practical standpoint to get rid of the separate network transport and USB bus.  I have a Raspberry Pi running piCorePlayer, and all it does is read the stream from LMS on the ethernet connection, decode it to PCM, and send it out the USB to the DAC.   A ridiculously trivial job even for the little RPi.

On the other hand, with a built-in network transport, you are limited to whatever kind of stream the device supports.

No it's alive and well and getting better. Elegance is subjective and not necessarily related to SQ. You'll find more info on other sites that specialize in digital audio.

Dying?  No.  But as with most interfaces, they change and get refined.  IP seems to be the future, and some of the best sounding digital sources currently use IP.

In my experience, our systems and installs continue(d) to use optical Toslink on most projects because we found there was less noise and drops than USB, most likely due to the elimination of the USB Bus (they get busy) and any EMI/RFI interference.

Most of our current designs and systems use IP.  For clients that appreciate the performance and are willing to cover the cost, a properly terminated and deployed fiber network can have audio benefits.  Some audio designers and integrators are afraid of fiber, but we love it and highly recommend a proper fiber network to anyone wanting the best performance out of their music system.

Allan
www.In-Tone.com

USB is not dying at all. Like others have said it is getting better. That said, putting Ethernet right in the DAC can eliminate the Ethernet to USB converter that many of us are using (sonore, sotm, etc). I still see the initial stages of audio over IP being as problematic as USB though. As DAC manufactures implement IP with little understanding of how the protocol works, sort of like we saw with USB when it first came out.