Ready For Digital Source...Computer?

@high-amp  Thanks for answering my question.

Many ways to go about what you are trying to achieve. Other posters have offered you valuable advice.

If you are truly trying to keep it simple, while rebuilding your finances, home, room, etc. an extra phone or tablet is a great solution. Depending on the OS, using an app or additional software to maximize sound quality (via this route) will deliver good results; even more so if you also focus on the quality of the cabling and using intermediate devices to ~clean~ things up.

Since you seem to be open to a DAC...

AND are keeping your budget reasonable...

AND are open to a ~multi~ function device...

AND since it hasn't been mentioned...>>>

Take a hard look at offerings from iFi Audio. High scores on performance to value, on overall flexibility, portability, and broad feature sets.

ghdprentice Thanks, I’m aware of these products and will research them further.

avid_ten - Great advice. I have heard great things about the Ifi Zen Stream. Thanks so much!

A MBP with bitperfect is a decent source sonically.  depending on the program you use to catalog and stream it can be weak or strong, but you want streaming anyway. I'm not sure how good/bad the native streaming clients are - warning I have seen some that are different animals on their own, and vastly btter in, say Roon.

The bifront multibit is decent.  No more IMO.  But you did say, honstly, mid-fi.  At what, $700 its ok but there are much better.  The non-multibit is weaker IMO.

itsjustme - $700 it's ok but there are much better"

Suggestions, please?

Hello high-amp.  I've been using a computer as a music source for over 24 years. If it's good enough for the Library of Congress to archive historically important music, it's good enough for me. I record live perfprmances at both 44/16 and 96/24 and edit using Wave Pad (highly recommended), and another program that lets you edit one channel at a time.  Spotify and Amazon put low level "ticks" into the music to prevent persons from selling their recordings. It is audible on good systems. Very annoying!  Many YouTube offerings are of high quality and generally do not have "ticks."  What are these "streamers" anyway? Special purpose computers, of course. As for computer noise, some are noisier than others. Inside the cabinet sound cards tend to be noisier that others. Take a pair of sensitive headphones with you to the computer store and plug them into an attractive unit. Take a thumb drive with low level tunes of high quality on it (girl singers w/guitar, chamber music). Play the music using the computer's own software. Move the cursor around as the music plays. Do you hear any odd noises? Pause the music and turn up the volume. Wiggle the cursor around. Hear anything? if not, good!

Media Monkey software is available in a free version and sounds good to me. I use a desktop computer I assembled (easy), and a laptop with an external DAC running off the USB out on the computer. I edit and produce CDs and files of all sorts of music and it all sounds fine. These multi-thousand dollar streaming boxes seem unnecessary to me and cannot give you anything better than the files they download. You don't need them. Enjoy!