Music Server Advice

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Adasdad,

The Esoteric D-05x is the best I can afford @ $8K, So I'm looking for a comparable music streamer to pair with it. 

Put a Roon Nucleus on your LAN and wire it via ethernet (whatever it takes) to a Lumin U1 or U2 then attach the USB to your Esoteric. My system is Nucleus to U1 to Chord M-Scaler and currently Chord Qutest so everything is upsampled to 705.6 or 768. I too like the Roon app. Well within your budget.

This:

Check out SmallGreenComputer.com.  I have been using their products, and the Sonore products they sell for years.  Very reliable, easy to use, and fantastic support from Andrew.  IMHO, they offer great value by keeping their casework simple and eschewing expensive marketing.  The sound is wonderful, and I am using mostly their entry level kit.  I would imagine their better offerings would be competitive with many more expensive options.  They have a 30 day return option, too.

Do the optical bundle:

https://www.smallgreencomputer.com/collections/recommended-solutions/products/the-uromd-bundle

I've never used Roon and don't intend to either because it has the potential to interfere with the original recordings.

I use an Aurender N20 with the Conductor App via Android, however Aurender do tend to prefer Apple, but Conductor doesn't interfere with the original sound in any way.

I have over 3000 Cds, SACDs, DVD-A's and BLU-RAYS stored on my Aurender SSD drives. When you have that amount of storage the last thing you want is pics because it'll take you forever to scroll through them.

Conductor has an option called Folder which gives a DOS like list of everything you've got.

Pics are for Noobs, but they're there if you need them.

If you can't stretch to the N20 the N200 is a fine machine.