Better to buy a high end network player with a DAC?

Melco seems to offer mostly servers included with players.  Servers inside a player seems a bad idea?  Dont follow why melco is any good.  They offer an expensive switch for 2k, which if u use an optical connections seems pointless.

The premise is flawed.  Plenty of great players out there come minus a DAC.  Melco, for one

Would you mind elaborating how you can make such a generalized statement with absolutely no explanation?

In actual fact, if done properly, integrating the streamer/player in the same component as the DAC offers a number of advantages including the fact that the player and DAC can share the same master clock internally, the signal paths are magnitudes shorter in length than any interface connection made outside the box, and if the manufacturer knows what they are doing, the player software can be optimized for the DAC chip itself.

How all these threads raving about Lumin players cannot at the very minimum acknowledge that the products are glorified Chinese knock-offs of Linn DS/DSM network music players is baffling, especially when the Linn products have far better performance and features.

 but you lose independence that a separate dac allows.

Almost every network music player I am aware of (Linn, Naim, SimAudio, etc.) offer the option of an SPDIF output if you really want to use a separate DAC.

Ironlung,

very helpful comments, so it seems a dac inside a player is appropriate in light of all the stuff that goes on inside box that most have no clue about...

Neg comments about Lumin see abit unfair.