Streamer Recommendation.

OP here.  I want to thank all the kind posters above.  What a wealth of helpful  information. 

I am leaning toward a Auralic Aries G2.1 (DAC less) transport with  2 TB SSD storage.  

I should make my purchase at the end of November(+/ -) I will post my impressions and set- up experience in Jan 23

At this point I will not bore you with the issues I would have in running cable (tri level house, block walls, flat roof, 13 Ft ceiling etc.).  

Anyway, thanks again.  

@rbsaudio

i think you are making a fine choice with the auralic, especially with your need to use wifi - you just need to make sure your wifi is solid, with strong signal

i would add though, in my music room i am using a mesh router satellite to deliver a ’virtual’ ethernet feed into my roon core/streamer, and it works very well -- one day i may bite the bullet, drill through and run an actual hardwire ethernet, but so far i have avoided that need with excellent performance with the mesh system

Notice to Vault users.   I backed up my Vault 2i onto a 2 TB drive, plugged it into my PC and dragged and dropped a bunch of CD rips onto my Aurenders 4TB drive.  

Works great, after scanning the drive the Aurender assembled the missing album art on some rips.   You can also edit Metadata if some is missing 

Aurender N200 is an awesome machine.   You can use it with an Ethernet over AC adapter.  I use one by TP Link, it works great.   No noise or issues.  To ensure no nasty artifacts from that scheme I use a TP Link gig switch with 2 SFP ports.  That allows me to electronically decouple my Aurender and Vault via a fiber optic media converter to each one .   Super black, quiet background .   

I have heard Aurender will work on WiFi if you plug a specific Realtek wifi adapter into one of the accessory USB ports.  I have not proven that but the Ether over AC works great for me.   I had a Netgear wifi over AC unit and it injected noise.  The TP Link gear is dead quiet.  

i would add though, in my music room i am using a mesh router satellite to deliver a ’virtual’ ethernet feed into my roon core/streamer, and it works very well -- one day i may bite the bullet, drill through and run an actual hardwire ethernet, but so far i have avoided that need with excellent performance with the mesh system

This. I don’t even have a dedicated backhaul on my mesh (dual band) and it works fine. Thing opens up flexibility as well. Luckily my office is in the same room as the base node so I got 2 PCs, Network storage unit and an old Sonos zp90 hard wired to the base and my main rig has a Roon core host hard wired direct to a sat node . Every now and then I gotta reboot the base but its rare.

I wouldn't even want a streamer with wifi hardware inside of it.

The truth is that most folks would vouch for whatever brands they happen to own. Most have never done an extended in-home comparison between multiple brands at the same time. For example, if you’re an Aurender user, you would claim that it’s the best streamer out there. If you use Innuos (like myself), you will sing praises for Innuos. Ditto for Auralic, Lumin, etc. Also, when someone claims that they owned brand A but now own brand B which they prefer, it’s important to ask how long ago did they own brand A. Things change relatively quickly in this segment of the industry and any opinions formed based on a 3-4 year-old experience should be taken with a grain of salt.

Personally, I think all the big names -- Aurender, Auralic, Innuos, Lumin, etc. offer wonderful sound quality and reliability. There are more similarities than differences within the same price brackets. I ended up buying Innuos but I doubt I would have been any less satisfied had I bought Aurender or Auralic. If Aurender supported Roon, I probably would have bought the N10 since I really liked it. But I can tell you that I don’t find Innuos Zenith to be a lesser proposition by any means. I also know I would have been equally happy with Auralic or Lumin. Just sayin’ ...