New streamer needed

Buy a separate dac ,streamer Innous pulsar very good streamer 

and best dac under $10k under $7k ar close T+A A200 dac. That being said you need a good LPS on your router ,decent Ethernet switch Lhy sw8

andfor sure quality cables and power cords .

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.

oh, btw, totally disagree with @ghdprentice regarding the long-term prospects of Roon (keeping in mind what I’ve already said, which is that I’m a fan).  Roon very powerfully integrates your cd collection, burned on a NAS and/or residing on a dedicated server, with whatever your streaming service is.  But the really brilliant differentiator for Roon is their software works with almost everybody else’s hardware.  This is particularly useful if you have multiple systems - you can mix and match and change your streamers and dacs to your heart’s delight.  Finally, the Harman acquisition secures Roon’s future, and hegemony, for a long time, IMHO. Most of their higher-cost competitors are small, specialty companies.  

I’ve been in kind of a similar situation relative to price range. Only that I’m looking to upgrade my current streamer. Which sounds great, but tends to be quite glitchy (Pi2 design Mercury). Within that contending field - Volumio Rivo, Lumin U2 Mini, used Aurelic or Aurender etc. But why not Eversolo DMP A6 Masters edition or even the A8? The A8 is a kind of all in one. Not the direction I’d prefer to go, but is supposed to be so good in its components and design to be worth it.

The British Audiophile did some nice comparisons between the A8 and and (I think) Aurelic streamer: 

Thanks for all the suggestions of brands and models. Not sure about the Eversolo, but the Volumio Rivo seems to match very will with the Merason Frerot. However, I prefer a streamer with the option of adding an internal 4tb ssd card. And then, of course, is the question is how it will natch with the rest of my system (Audible Illusions Modulus 3A, Belles SA-100, Audio Physic Caldera. Still some work to do to find this out...