Lumin has a good reputation for sound quality. I have not heard one so I can’t really comment on it.
However I own two Aurender and have heard a couple others. Streamers is all that Aurrender does and the produce what is probably the best. At shows, if a company does not have their own, they are demonstrating with a flagship Aurrender. I have compared with a couple other products and in their price category Aurrender wins. aurrender service is amazing. You can access it within the app, I have gotten a response within hours on a question and if they need to do something, they can log onto your machine and change something… at least with my W20SE they can.
Each level of performance is worth it if you have the equipment to support it. So, a $10K streamer if you have $2K components (preamp, DAC, amp, etc) makes no sense. My very general rule of thumb for optimal performance is each component should be roughly the same investment. Getting something much better makes sense during an upgrade cycle. Having said that, my streamer is about 20% more than my DAC, preamp… etc). Totally worth it.
The streamer is critical, if it is not the best possible signal, then the rest of the components are not going to fix it.
If you want to go down the “but it is only bits”… line of reasoning… forget it.. that is a complete waste of time. It matters, and it matters big time. I kept thinking that way for years and it condemned my digital sound quality to very disappointing mediocrity. Now my analog and digital are at the same great level.
