spend on the streamer or on the DAC ?

They’re both really important.  I recently upgraded from a Mac Mini to a Lumin U1 Mini and the improvement was massive in my system.

That said, I would start with the best DAC you can afford and plan to add a streamer as your next upgrade since you can stream from your MacBook.

yes indeed

going from a jittery noisy everyday computer, not optimized for music streaming, to a dedicated streamer will see a huge improvement in SQ

but going from one decent dedicated music streamer to another, not so much, usually

ymmv as always

I had a Bluesound Node 2 and Schiit Bifrost 2 and was looking to upgrade the DAC and first and the streamer later. But after evaluating different options, I settled on an integrated streaming DAC: Cary Audio DMS-550.  Mainly for the following reasons:

1.   One less set of cables in the signal path and avoid any possible degradation of sound quality.

2.  How to allocate the budget between a streamer and a DAC. Given a budget, a respectable audio company would optimize the sound quality by spending appropriately on both streaming and DAC sections.

I am very happy with the DMS-550 and it would have been difficult for me to match its performance by going the separates route for the same budget.

test

@techno_dude

Well, it looks like you are able to post on this thread....just not the other one?