I'm building a control box for a live setup using at least one Raspberry Pi 4 with Arduino for HID
(for now... plan to use an FPGA at some point to offload major tasks and have so far read only the one paper found on PD and FPGAs. (any ideas I'd love to bandy about!)

Elk Audio insinuates preference for HiFiBerry's ADC+DAC Pro and also as I've not seen any news of an Elk product designed for the OS additionally something universal would be preferable. (Elk community appears fairly small)
Patchbox OS is nice but Im not leaning toward a 'VST box' or being locked into Patchbox's hardware

Does Bela have the edge in overall useability plus community? BeagleBoneBlack (which i do not own) appears well used and supported with a good community.

Ideally a bare metal solution for Rpi4 CM, perhaps a cluster leans toward maybe a Raspa/Yocto build?

Looking for the lowest latency to get away with an Rpi build atm

I don't have time to design a specialized DAC, nor the incllination to try a ton.

What is the best, possibly future proof, DAC for RPi ? What is being commonly used?

Also: Elk / Bela / Patchbox who will survive?

@4poksy It has always been my opinion that an RPI is a fantastic little computer that is perfect for applications where low power consumption is important (on 24 hours a day, running headless).
Otherwise it is a horribly expensive solution once all necessary add-ons have been bought so as to make it useful.
A second hand laptop is way cheaper, has more user friendly software, and is more capable than a RPI.
It has a backup battery, a screen, a keyboard, a trackpad, a power supply, lots of memory...... etc.... and a huge choice of sound cards with very low latency.
The second hand laptop could even be lighter than the RPI + this + that + a decent protective box.
David.

@whale-av sure, but a second-hand laptop can't be easily embedded into an enclosure, and it's not that easy to make a little music box. I don't know though what the OP want's to build exactly.

@4poksy Bela's latency gets down to 1ms, probably will not get that on pi without spending more and probably expending some time. Don't know Elk but their site irritated me and I gave up trying to find out about them. Bela and Patchbox are probably not going anywhere soon but I would probably go with Bela if longevity was a concern, they seem to be thinking about the longterm more than Patchbox.

I appreciate all replies!
Reason for Pi is I have a bunch of them left from various projects over the years and they're super embeddable and modular without having to design custom circuits. Same with arduinos. Ideally a custom FPGA ASIC would be righteous. As per the paper though "FPGA-accelerated Real-Time Audio in Pure Data" they were successful doing physical modeling on a Terasic DE10-Nano but tooling for any realtime interactivity with the core was essentially non existent at the time of writing (2022). I don't understand FPGAs well enough to come up with a good solution yet, but parallel programming is somewhat comparable to writing an orchestral piece. The logic circuits can be rearranged so you could have different setups for different heavy synthesis types, just not on the fly iirc.

I could see having two FPGA cores to switch between heavy instrumentations w an MCU handling the rest of the audio functionality. Will need to hire ssomeone to write this. Accepting applications!
Thankfully modern FPGA's allow for c++ and python.

The Box im building is for patch recall and midi mapping with realtime programming built into the workflow. I want to get away from the laptop .with. PD.

@alexandrous exactly. Laptops are wonderful, absolutely, but looking at the screen for hours building sound machines and then using the same thing to improvise emotionally and then for email, web etc is wearisome and counterproductive. Keeping form factor and desk space small is crucial as well. Yes of course a screen is still necessary but w/a workflow more like an Elektron machine hence the desire to know the computational expense of atoms pushed to their limit (which is obviously a super lengthy and nearly impossible venture). Industrial 3" screens are are kind of better than capacitive or resistive touch screens

So maybe HiFiBerry is at the top of Pi DACs. Patchbox feels like a toy, definitely could be wrong. If latency between platforms can be solved a Pi/arduino cluster of sorts can make pD experimenting much more fun than sitting with the laptop ALL day. I don't think the human brain feels the same about things we can't immediately aurally detect. The vibe of a violin vs that of a synthesized violin is different. Embracing the difference is one thing but having standards in the architecture of the synth is like having standards in the making of a Stradivarius vs an amazon basics factory production. We're living in the decline of culture bc we accept the 'just enough' philosophy of building without functional aesthetics. Starting to ramble..

Bela looks really good and agree with @old about Elk and the site etc, lol, I perceive they have things going on behind the scenes, buyouts, integration, who knows... they may surprise us. Either way I've found a good route so I guess it's the HifiBerry or have a custom built to spec.

Flux-ai could probably design one flawlessly. BTW very interested to see @old 's large language patch mentioned in previous discussion.

@whale-av largely agree especially about the pi's, spent so much over the years on add-ons cameras, etc.. but the ideaa behind is awesome. Just really tired of laptops, not even in a dawless sense but the whole of it.