Looking for best streamer without DAC under $3500

the Oppo players have ability to stream Tidal and you can use an outboard DAC if needed. sound very good. i still prefer flac files stored on a hard drive to streaming. i don’t see the point in spending thousands just to hear the White Album again.  however i can see the point in exploring a lot of new music. but for SQ maybe i am missing something?  if so how does streaming trump physical media?

When visiting the XFI Premium hifi show in Holland late last year I found myself in the a room that Aurender and dCS were sharing. I eventually managed to chat to two guys together each representing their respective companies.
This turned into a lengthy conversation because there was much I did not understand and surprisingly even the Aurender rep. agreed that the dCS Network Bridge was superior. A stranger joined our little group who owned a dCS N/B and claimed he extensively auditioned at home a few top streamers before deciding.

Although I did not get to hear the dCS unit, I did hear on more than one occasion in other rooms, an Aurender being used to demo some very expensive kit.
Some of this was mesmerising and decided that day to look out for a used Network Bridge. I returned home and immediately set about checking out reviews on the net. All of them rave about it.

Raspberry Pi + Volumio + Spotify plugin. Total: 125$ including metal case and Samsung EVO Micro-SD card.

Volumio is using standard and ultra-flexible MPD (Music Player Daemon). I’ve used it since many years. It has nice Web interface, and since it’s mpd, i can use any mpd client with it: I have on on my cell, ncmpcpp (shell based) on my Linux laptop, etc.
The raspberry is plugged on my Rega DAC-R and works perfectly. I listen 95% FLAC, 5% online streaming.

My equipment: Intel NUC Mini 7i5BNH i5-7260U DDR NUC7i5BNH in the place of a Roon Nucleus that I used to use.  My purpose:  Using Roon to stream Tidal and mostly to explore for new music.  My accompanying DAC a tubed Cary Audio 200ts.  With this DAC connected to an Oppo UDP-203 player, I can listen to music either via CD or streamed.  The sound quality is great, but I am having issues with Roon streaming Tidal, sometimes it works and sometimes not, i.e., sometimes Roon just cannot make Tidal play.  I noticed the reference here to using Spotify by others.  Does Spotify have the same sound quality as Tidal, where if you upgrade to 19.99 a month, you get hi resolution quality?  But insights on how to get Roon proprietary software to mesh with Tidal software would be an eye opener, if you can fill that in.  Cheers.       

@ rbstehno  could you explain us what do you mean by "usb crap" please?  It's just a digital interface and DAC with USB Async mode exists since years...
I've listened to many high end sound systems driven by USB DAC including Meitner and the results were stunning...
I recycled an Atom mini server for my friend and installed on it Debian + MPD.  It is hooked to Ayre QB9, Krell KRC-3, Krell KSA-200s and Dynaudio Speakers: Wow factor is much present!