Hidizs AP 80 Pro - Alternative to Laptop with long USB cable and Schiit DAC?

Your Onkyo doesn’t seem to support LDAC Bluetooth codec, which means the Hidizs would need to use a lossy compression algorithm to send the audio to your receiver. Not exactly ideal.

There are two ways to cut down on the cord length. You can connect a streamer to the Modi 3 or you can connect your receiver to your network and stream directly from the PC to the Onkyo. Either method would utilize a protocol called DLNA / UPnP which is lossless and bit perfect.

The streamer can be a PC that you don’t use a lot anymore or something like a WiiM Pro or a Raspberry Pi. The WiiM Pro would be the easiest to set up. Just connect it to your network and link it to the Modi with a digital coax cable.

Alternatively, you can connect your Onkyo to your network and send the audio directly to your receiver. Unfortunately, this also means you’re completely bypassing the Modi 3.

If you want to stream from your PC, I suggest a Windows app called Stream What You Hear (link). This sends all your computer audio to a DLNA / UPnP device.

The WiiM Pro is a streamer. It looks like you found some listings on Reverb and eBay with good pricing. The only thing is if you buy used or off eBay and get a defective unit, it might be hard to return and get a replacement.

If you were to get a WiiM and you want to use the app on your phone to control playback, you’ll need to enable ’Media Streaming’ on the Windows PC that stores the music files. This will turn on the UPnP server. The WiiM app should then be able to locate your Music library on your PC. There are plenty of how-tos if you do a search on Google.

Otherwise, you can install Stream What You Hear (SWYH) on your laptop and stream all the audio on your laptop to the WiiM or the Onkyo (if you connect it to your network). SWYH is a UPnP streaming app for Windows. Have a look at the ’Getting Started’ guide - link.

If you want to experiment without having to buy anything, try connecting your Onkyo receiver to your network. Here are the instructions for setting up the wi-fi connection - link. If the receiver is close to your router, then try a wired Ethernet connection instead. Download and install SWYH and follow the steps in the Getting Started guide. See if you can successfully find the Onkyo as a UPnP renderer and stream to it. I’ve done this before with my PC and a Raspberry Pi as well as an Oppo UDP-203. It was pretty straightforward to get everything working.