Yesterday the Pi 4 arrived with the Argon 1 case, and it went together fairly easily. The Argon is perfect for my application, the power button works well, and should save wear & tear on the USB-C port. Temp reported at 35.4 C which is cooler than the Pi 3B+ I have in a stock Raspberry Pi plastic case. Happy happy.
The initial playback with this as an endpoint running Moode 7.1.0 was really promising, powered by the Allo Nirvana. Unfortunately, that was short lived as playback interruptus reared it's ugly head quite quickly. I've been experiencing this with the Pi 3b+ too.
It seems that MPD is hanging, and causes problems. I can kill the process and get it running again but this isn't ideal. It can sometimes play over an hour, or last less than a minute. Sometimes the track that is playing gets truncated and it jumps to the next track. Sometimes music halts abruptly and is replaced by something similar to white noise.
From all the logs I can read I am suspecting this is a connectivity issue. For wireless, one could assume that an external antenna or dongle might be the answer. The Mac Mini connected to the DAC can play wirelessly without issue, however it has good internal antennas. I've ordered a wifi dongle for the Argon, one which should be supported by the Moode kernel. It will be weeks though before that arrives.
I also tried ethernet and the same issue occurs. That really surprised me. The ethernet connection isn't typical, it uses the coaxial cabling in the house together with a MoCA adapter to get into the living room.
The ethernet worked fine when the Mini was connected to the DAC as well. So something in the transmission to the UPnP client (Moode) is problematic if my suspicion is correct. Hard to determine so far if this is an Audirvana issue or Moode issue or just connectivity. Searching hasn't found a solution yet. This morning I will connect my Audirvana on Windows installation and see if that changes anything.
Beyond that troubleshooting may be delayed, as two new goodies arrive today which will need attention (who can resist ?).