Streamer advice

For that $$ I’d recommend the new Magna Mano-Farad combo. i2s and your choice of SPDIF with a world class PS. Bluesound is a good first streamer but you don’t need another DAC.

Why not just match up your iFi? With an iFi Elite PS (I have one on my Ras Pi) you’ll get better SQ than a Bluesound.

The mobile player apps for piCore Player/LMS are Orange Squeeze for Android and iPeng for iOS. I’ve only used the former but I know happy campers here with the latter. Magna are the only builders I know that will personally help with setup and any hiccups. It is much more preferable and 1Acustomizable than BluOS which I also have. I’ve found MoOde to be "mobile" unfriendly and buggy. Free Volumio formerly played Qobuz and Tidal with BubbleUPnP in front of it, but after the recent upgrade it doesn’t work for me any more. Free V. DOES NOT play them as Hans Beekhuyzen implies it does in a recent video. miniDSP and Pro-Ject offer custom Volumio builds that do stream them w/o a V. subscription but both of these benefit from PS upgrades to their wall warts, which are unnecessary with the Mano Ultra. LMS extensions play most streams like BluOS does except for Amazon Music with additions from Bandcamp and SoundCloud. It is preferable to me since you can turn off the stupid persistent queue.

I’ve heard good things about iFi Zen streamer but I don’t own one.

Good luck.

i agree w @fuzztone 

ifi zen stream is outstanding, dedicated streamer / roon endpoint, and if used with a linear power supply the sound produced is well well above its very modest price point, and significantly purer than the node (as streamer)

i use it in my system with certain dacs, in roon only mode, fed by ethernet ... i believe earlier versions had some issues with wifi connectivity but i do understand firmware updates have solved those issues

@fuzztone 

Thanks for the feedback. I’ll stay in my fast lane with Conductor and ROON apps :-)

Thanks everyone---I've been reading and watching some good reviews about the Zen Stream as well so that's another contender. I guess I could always connect the Node to the Zen DAC (so I can still use it). Hoping the connectivity issues are resolved like someone else mentioned.