Streamer? Aurender's "caching streaming" ? how important is this feature?

I highly recommend Aurender for their excellent sound quality for the money. That is all they do is streaming. I own two after a very exhaustive search.

@audiocanada I’ve posted a lot on the forums lately in response to people’s inquiries on Aurender, and hopefully people aren’t getting tired of me. In transparency, I am also an Aurender dealer, always happy to work with folks. 

To add to Carlsbad on SSD caching committing files to memory, it’s not just about giving the streamer full control, but also has much to do with noise reduction. The 240GB NvME SSD drive inside the unit is lodged into the board, so there is no wiring between it and the remainder of the hardware. It is also very fast since files are committed to memory, so in combination with the great clocks Aurender provides, the sampling/timing is much more “in focus” than playing it straight from the internet. Think of it like your computer’s RAM, and just like current is important with any amplifier, instantaneous access and delivery is crucial for stellar digital audio. 

thank you, so which of their competitors offer caching?

Heck, my Raspberry Pi running moOde offers "caching". In the options it's called the audio buffer and the max size is 64 MB. For a stereo 24/192 file, that's about a minute's worth of music. It can also prefetch the next song in the queue and put that in memory.

So do most reputable player programs.