Lumin or Aurender

Love my Aurender A10.  Sounds as good as my PS Audio Directstream (streaming via their “Bridge" network card).  But aside from SQ, nothing beats that Conductor app in my book.  Can sit and play stuff from my iPad forever, constantly finding new artists, adding to faves, making playlists, etc.  And, when I’m using Roon with the Directstream the next day in my home office system, all that Quobuz metadata carries through to Roon.  

When I compared streamers, Auralic sounded better than both the Lumin and Aurender, plus their DS Lightning software was far superior. For a while I used the Lumin software against the Auralic. This is when I used the streamer hooked up to the dac by usb. Since then, got rid of the Auralic, and all the usb crap and went with Roon running on a server outside of my audio room and got a dac with a network interface, sounds better and the UI is the best. 2nd best option would be using an endpoint device that had an i2s output to the dac.

+1 on @three_easy_payments.  That's not a bad deal.  The A1 is a model above the T2.  I have the T1 and I've been extremely satisfied.  There isn't going to be substantial sq different between the Lumin and the Aurender - they're both great streamers/dacs.

My vote for Lumin. It gives you more options with streaming services. Lumin supports Tidal MQA decoding, Aurender don’t. However, if you live in Russia doesn’t matter...unfortunately Hi Res streaming services does not exist in Russia. 

Lumin T2 is awesome.  A couple things not mentioned yet - Lumin offers huge flexibility in upsampling and downsampling (not sure about the others in this regard) and a bunch of other settings options that are very useful.  Second, I think some might be put off by the fact that you have to have a separate storage somewhere for ripped CDs.  If running Roon and using WiFi, get a laptop that meets Roon basic specs (about $400), put it in a closet near your router, rip all your CDs using something like DBpowerAmp (very simple), and now you have a streamer/DAC (Lumin) that has no moving parts !  Arguably moving parts can break, and/or affect sound quality.  Roon servers IMO are just expensive computers.  Running the Lumin via WiFi is simple, no noise (fans, hard drives, etc.), and foolproof in my experience.   Also using this general solution the Lumin U1 mini is a smoking deal if you can forego the DAC/streamer option, then you can continue to upgrade your DAC or play with DAC options as time goes on without having to re-rip music. But again, having owned a bunch of quality DACs, the T2 is really good.