For those that have separate Streamers & DACS

correction: I was running a NUC+LPS to my DAC with ethernet, via a Bonn 8 network switch.

Troy Boys,

Good to know you found Innuos to be the best SQ.

I bought one with:

-No DAC

-Rips

-Stores

To me that is the simplest solution. I shopped  2 years back and got

a new one for $2,200. Zen 3. 

I stopped in at Axpona and looked at the Aurrender display. They have a model

for $5k? that appeared quite impressively built. 

I'll keep mine. 

Aurender here-- just traded up from ACS10 to A30-- WOW-- Great dac!!!!

I moved from a Bluesound Node 2i to an Auralic Aries G1 with both feeding into the DAC on a PS Audio Gain Cell. 

The Node 2i is a great product and I always thought it had a great sound and features for the money.

The Aries G1 is a step up with great detail and overall SQ and is built like a tank with two heavy duty power supplies. The Lightning DS application is also a huge step up from the Bluesound application with a lot of features for those that like to fine-tune output settings.

Auralic Aries G2.1 and G1 streamers are the peak value for that category. 1GB in-memory processing cache and you get to use their Lightning DS control app, which obviates the need for a Roon Core or any other core, sounding better than Roon. In two systems, I mate my Auralic Aries G1 streamer to a Bricasti M1 LE Gold sigma-delta DAC, and in the other, the Auralic Aries G2.1 is mated to a Bricasti M21 DAC that allows sigma-delta, R2R or DSD in analog processing.

I have not found a DAC yet for which Auralic's streamers don't improve the sound over direct DAC connection from a computer-based streamer-server.

Auralic also put a high effort into their Wifi implementation to make it as quiet-as or quieter than Ethernet. It's true. This was important to me as I needed to feed two systems from a common 4TB ripped digital source along with Qobuz and Tidal Masters, without running Ethernet to both. Auralic suggests defaulting to Wifi, and I can say in my environment, the wifi input is quieter than Ethernet.

The fact that I have the Auralic streamers mated to Bricasti DACs (I've also used MHDT Pagoda Balanced and Atlantis to equal effect, and have a Holo May in for evaluation now) is less important than that the streamers improve the musicality of the DACs. I've tried. I can make many modest DACs perform above their segment with a stellar streamers. So while I am not making a blanket statement, in principle I advocate segratating streamers from DACs, and nailing the streamer first.

Phil