All Benchmark System Question

In my experience you can venture a bit too far in the too detailed / analytical direction and that all recordings will sound better with better less analytical component(s) more musical. I would start at the signal source, if that is harsh and cold then everything else takes on that cast. For instance a high quality music streamer is going to sound leagues better than a PC. If the source is excellent then move to the DAC. But the key is not to look at this as a 20% of the recording problem... this is a whole system problem. There are bad recordings... sure... but it is easy to have a system that makes all recording sound good,.. just some are not as good as others.

Mhdt might be another good choice for a different sounding DAC. 

So many great ideas, thanks! I am streaming from my iphone over wi-fi to a Node 2i so maybe that could be improved. I am so itching to hear Coda amp and preamp but I would have to sell the Benchmark stuff. If you haven’t heard Benchmark yet and are in a position to it’s really worth it. Yes, there is no harmonic distortion but if the recordings are good to very good the music, even out of my little P3SER’s is amazing. If you are into tubes don’t bother though.

Definitely start with the source then. See if you can borrow one of the less expensive Aurender Streamers. The difference will be jaw dropping. Also try Qobuz streaming service… free for a month. I started digital streaming about 15 years ago… incrementally upgrading all components piece by piece from an iPod on both my headphone system and main system. I held off the longest on getting a dedicated streamer… it’s only spitting out bits, right? Wrong… it is the source… everything that follows is completely dependent and contingent on it. It is the key source like in an analog system… the TT, then phono stage, then preamp… etc. they all matter, but a noisy poor start equals highly amplified carefully crafted poor sounding stuff. I recommending at least as much as any other component. My streamer is about 20% more than most of the other components in my system components and well worth it! I got there incrementally so know the intermediate steps.

My digital end is now very comparable to my high end analog end.

These streamer suggestions are great. I had a great improvement in my sound when I went with a Ubiquiti network switch ($200) and fibre optic cable directly from that to my Sonore OpticalRendu. Then from there USB to my DAC.  

When I first heard this setup I was amazed at how much an improvement over my 5 year old Sonore microRendu. I actually bought a second "OpticalRendu for ROON Only" ($999) for my AudioMirror DAC. My streaming quest is now done.

I have a noisy network with my music server on a cheap computer far away in another room. That room is setup on my home network by a PowerLine subnet. So nothing anyone would say is noiseless. However, when the bits get to that last mile before the DAC I believe the fibre kills the noise. Otherwise, my setup should sound awful.

I am going to buy the AudiByte VOX | ZAP DAC next week. It has built-in streaming that is supposed to be advanced (on the not yet available HUB module). It will be interesting to compare the OpticalRendu with the built-in network streaming on the AudiByte.

If the source is bad then on the BM stack the sound is bad.