Lumin or Aurender

I like the LUMIN U1 Mini. Great streamer. It will do upsampling if you want. It’s a Roon endpoint. It can be modified easily to be powered by an external SBooster LPS. The SQ is great and cost is competitive with other options. It also tends to come up on the secondary market periodically so you can buy one at less than retail and sell it when you want to upgrade. Lastly, LUMIN pushes software updates to your streamer at no additional cost where at least one other popular streamer maker charges for their software updates. 

T2 still competitive?

if wanting a streaming DAC to hook up to one or more hard drives, what else would you look at besides T2, at this point. A year and a half have gone by since this was active. Also, if doing LUMIN, would you do u1 mini and a $2000 DAC, or T2 in one box? 
Also, how much better sound quality are any of these versus using an OPPO UDP-205 as streamer DAC?

 

T2 still competitive?

if wanting a streaming DAC to hook up to one or more hard drives, what else would you look at besides T2, at this point. A year and a half have gone by since this was active. Also, if doing LUMIN, would you do u1 mini and a $2000 DAC, or T2 in one box? 
Also, how much better sound quality are any of these versus using an OPPO UDP-205 as streamer DAC?

 

Aurender bested lumin on every level during the last 2 years. 
 

I went through the same process a couple of time.  In the end, determined I needed a dedicated music server, streamer and DAC.  Decided to get a DAC / Streamer combo to cut down on cables and avoid the USB questions.  I run ROON and source music from Qobuz and my personal online music library.  Pretty much committed to streaming.  A bit over your budget (maybe not preowned) but I ended up with:

Bacasti M3 w/ network card - looked at Lumin but decided to stay local.

Small Green Computer - sonicTransporter i5 w/ 4TB SSD

Overall I'm really happy and back to listening and discovering music instead of chasing equipment.