Best streamer for Audio Note UK dacs

As much you love your AN DAC, it appears your bottleneck is AN DAC and USB converter not Zen 3. Adding Phoenix clock or Upgrading to Statement or EVO will not yield full benefits of their design if your DAC is limited to 16/44. If you want to venture into high resolution streaming or DSD downloads, get a DAC that can handle high resolution bits before you upgrade from Zen 3.

A streamer core job is to pass on digital bits natively to a DAC. Your DAC does the heavy lifting especially if you’re using USB protocol to transmit bits. IME, not all streamers and DAC created equal, a high quality DAC and Streamer works collectively in rendering qualitative benefits of a recording regardless of file resolution.

As you probably know, not every recording is going to sound better just because it’s high resolution, lot of it has to do with original master source of the file. I have heard and own many outstanding files in 16/44 and all the way upto DSD256.

Bottom line, ensure you have an audio system comprises of components that can allow you to appreciate the differences between low to high resolution files rather than focusing on which components will do better with low or high resolution files.

Thanks for your thoughtful reply. My digital sounds very good to my ears so I need to keep the AN DAC. It brought my digital so much closer to the musical enjoyment of vinyl. That in the addition of a six pack of REL subwoofers. I actually had a friend bring a Phoenix clock over and I heard it in my system with my Zen 3. It made a material difference that I really liked. So my plan was to buy the clock. But then when I add the clock and the cable and another power cord, it's not that much different money to just sell the Zen 3 and buy an Evo aeon or for a couple thousand more get an innuos statement. Given the improvement I heard with the clock, I'm sure the other improvements would yield some benefit. And my digital is sounding so close in terms of musical enjoyment to the analog now, that I may be selling my analog rig for now and using the money to upgrade. 

So it sounds like you're saying that there are some benefits that would be better realized with a dac that can handle higher sampling rates. Given the above that I've said, does anyone think the Evo or the NUS are necessarily better for 16/44? Or is that not really going to be a factor in my decision? I'm going to be buying used so I probably won't get a chance to audition. 

Thanks

I use an Auralic Aries G1 into an older AN Dac-3 Signature using a Jorma digital spdif RCA cable. I have the Aries set to output Flac 16/44.1 only and it works great and sounds great.

Check out the Steve Hoffman Audio Note thread. Lots of recommendations for streamers to use with AN Dacs. I think Grimm has been used as well as Aurender.

Thanks dsockel. Yeah it's funny I was just reading about the Grimm mu1 last night. Did optimizes for SPDIF and aes, so that's a good fit for the audio note and put as well.