Lumin or Aurender

T2 still competitive?

if wanting a streaming DAC to hook up to one or more hard drives, what else would you look at besides T2, at this point. A year and a half have gone by since this was active. Also, if doing LUMIN, would you do u1 mini and a $2000 DAC, or T2 in one box? 
Also, how much better sound quality are any of these versus using an OPPO UDP-205 as streamer DAC?

Aurender bested lumin on every level during the last 2 years. 
 

I went through the same process a couple of time.  In the end, determined I needed a dedicated music server, streamer and DAC.  Decided to get a DAC / Streamer combo to cut down on cables and avoid the USB questions.  I run ROON and source music from Qobuz and my personal online music library.  Pretty much committed to streaming.  A bit over your budget (maybe not preowned) but I ended up with:

Bacasti M3 w/ network card - looked at Lumin but decided to stay local.

Small Green Computer - sonicTransporter i5 w/ 4TB SSD

Overall I'm really happy and back to listening and discovering music instead of chasing equipment. 

I’d love to hear opinions on where we stand now on these models, Lunin T2, T3, X1 and others like Bricasti M3, etc.

How do they rank versus what has come out since this discussion was active a few years ago.