ugh. There are so many threads on this exact topic, just in the last month. You should do a search on the topic.
But, in a nutshell, there are two separate camps on this topic lurking here on this forum. One argues that spending a significant amount of $ on a streamer can be a waste of your precious resources, because the science, measurements and their experience tells them that beyond a basic level, there’s no difference in sound. The other camp argues that based on their experience, there are clear differences, and therefore recommend spending upwards of $10k in some situations in order to optimize one’s system. I'm squarely in the first camp. So here goes:
The only distinctions across streamers has to do with levels of jitter and other sources of noise. These are easily measurable. If your DAC is good at rejecting noise, you can assemble your own streamer for as little as $150 and it will sound great (and which I’ve done as an experiment myself). However, if you want something less kludgy than a Raspberry Pi, and you want a streamer that measures - and in some situations may sound - even better than a Pi (and measures and sounds comparable to some of the extremely high $ streamers out there), then there are a bunch of well regarded products that cost between $400 and $1k. They include the iFi Zen, the Volumio Rivo, Holo Red, Pro-Ject Stream Box S2 Ultra, the Primare Np5, and probably a bunch I’m forgetting. I have both an iFi and a Pro-Ject.
Btw, I’m a Roon fan, and also use Qobuz, which integrates seamlessly with Roon. Happy to share more if you’re interested. Good luck.
