A/B Comparison On A Pair Of Moderately Priced Streamers

I’m using a SMSL SD-9 streamer and a Musician Pegasus DAC. The pair are awesome performers, and the streamer connects to the internet wired or wirelessly and provides access to Tidal and Qobuz. The Streamer supports Optiical, Coaxial, AES, Bluetooth, USB, I2S outputs to the DAC. The streamer is only 399, and the DAC only 1199 and they sound great together. I would get a separate DAC, as that will have the greatest influence on sound quality.

One of the first things I did when I got my Vault 2i was to plug it into my existing DAC.   It was an improvement,  but like we all often do. I upgraded the DAC.  I enjoyed it for a while then I spent a little over $3k on my current DAC.  It sounds phenomenal,  best sounding source component I have ever owned.   

I wasn't in the market really for a streamer, not at the moment.    However I did a trade plus cash deal that let me jump into a brand new Aurender N200 for only $750 out of pocket.     It's a great machine.   Sounds excellent with my DAC and driving my headphone DAC also with it's dual outputs.  Easy to add songs via PC , build quality is over the top... built like a tank.  I love it and it's good enough to pair with an even better DAC down the road 

Vault /  Node is a really good value when you factor user interface,  features , sound.   Hard to beat. 

I have a Holo May KTE DAC, very happy with that. So getting a good DAC is paramount. Then I find all streamers sound different. I’m using a LUMIN U2 Mini, which I like a lot. The app is good too. It sounds a lot better with a cleaned up Ethernet connection.

"... my experience is upgrading a streamer is at least as impactful as upgrading a DAC."

So ... what you’re saying is that, given the same (uncompressed) source file, different streamers send different bits and bytes to the DAC? I can’t believe that to be the case.

One might be able to hear the dfference between compression rates, but even that is hard ... find out if you have a 100% score below.