New DAC or New Streamer or New Streamer/DAC

I agree with @stewart0722 in regards to his experience with N10. I have owned N10 for 5 plus years and there isn’t another server like N10 under $10K.

A few years ago I demo’d the Auralic Aries, Lumin, and a Aurender and I bought the Aries. I also think the Aurender SSD caching area is a gimmick. The Auralic Lightning DS GUI interface was far superior to the the others. But, I used the Lumin software in the beginning because I like the SQ better than the lightning software.
I got rid of all of the crap and went with Roon and a dac with a network card to bypass the inferior USB connection. Now, my server is in a different room and my dac is a Roon network endpoint.
BTW, I have 5 other rooms in my house that I use network servers as Roon endpoints to streamer different music from my 1 Roon server, which is not the Nucleus

I faced a similar decision last week and decided to purchase a Roon Nucleus (primarily for the Roon user interface), a Lumin U1, and a PS Audio DirectStream DAC. Now I’m (im)patiently waiting for FedEx to deliver the goods!

Depends on your budget of course, but at a similar price point to the Terminator, I can highly recommend Primaluna’s brand new EVO 100 DAC.

I took the plunge, and straight out of the box, it is a H U G E improvement over a modded Lampizator Amber 2, which is/was no slouch.

It compares favorably to DAC’s three times it’s intro price.

https://positive-feedback.com/reviews/hardware-reviews/primaluna-evo-100-tube-dac/

All the Aurilic stuff sounds overly digital - I had much better experience using my Roon Nucleus to feed my DAC. I also can't fathom adding tube noise to a DAC! I'm pretty sure my Ayre Codex sounds better at $1100 lower cost.