This thread kind of belongs both in Coreelec forum and audioscience forum
Few years ago I did some twinkering with my coreelec box and my raspberry+DAC streamer. I eventually found out that we can use coreelec Pulseaudio out to redirect all audio stream (decoded to PCM beforehand) to a raspberry with pulseaudio server, through local network …thus avoiding an hdmi to i2s extractor !
I tested this with success with stereo audio. This way I was able to harness my high quality DAC instead of [TV/box optical output + my not so good amplifier integrated DAC]
Now that coreelec basically becomes the best player out there, no need for any other player device and thus HDMI to i2s extractor becomes overkill hardware.
What do you think, is there any caveat with this approach ?