Recommended streamers/servers?

Have a close look at Aurender. They produce outstanding streamers in different configuration. I own two and have owned and listened to many others. I believe in general them to be the leaders in the field. There flagship is probably the most used reference streamer used in high end audio shows. They sound dead quiet (something not that common), very musical, and detailed. Buying used might be a good way to move up another level in their product lines.

I have found putting more money in the streamer than other non-speaker components a worthwhile investment. They are like turntables, if you don’t have it at the start of the signal chain then it isn’t coming out the other end… well, unless it is noise and distortion.

Auralic Aries G1 or G2.1. I have the former and think it’s great; I use the USB output. The latter is top of their line, and more costly.

Besides excellent streaming performance, both models include top-flight DSP that you can engage if you want to try resampling, parametric EQ, and such. (Or, you can leave it turned off.)

A excellent dac+ streamer board is the Bricasti M3 
retail is $ 6500, give Perrotta consultants a call and ask Him what is his best price is , it has a lot of high quality  for the money 
and many excellent reviews.

When I tried a streamer server years ago, the Auralic sounded better than the Aurender and others. I decided to stop using USB because it just never sounded good, so I bought a very good dac with i2s and Ethernet and went with Roon and sounds better than any configuration before. I don’t like proprietary servers because of many reasons, a couple are: no built in backups, sometimes proprietary OS’s, how are you going to fix an issue if the OS update fails or server can’t boot???
I understand that some of these proprietary servers tweak their USB ports for audio, but since I won’t use usb and no server company has software that compares more favorable than Roon, then why use a proprietary server

I have the sonore ultra rendu via usb to audio gd dac. It is mainly a room player   Excellent sound but have to go to settings section to select an airplay emulation.  Need this for Amazon hd which I added later.  Miss the flexibility of bluos but sonically no interest in changing