New streamer needed

The pro-ject is designed to facilitate the direct connection of an external drive to a usb input, and I think the iFi is as well.  not sure about the others I referenced, but you should check. Regarding the difference in sound you heard, there are two other reasons I could think of:

1) It could be that your DAC is not fully immune to jitter or other noise introduced to it from either your streamer or your cd transport.  If that were the case, you could hear a difference between the two. Btw, you never mentioned what model your old streamer was - that could be the culprit.

2) When you changed to cd, you listened intently for differences, and could simply be hearing what you were listening for.  That’s a classic opportunity for confirmation bias, something we’ve all experienced a time or two.  For a more in depth discussion of that, you could check out the thread “The Emperor Has No Clothes” (though full warning, you’ll have to wade thru a lot  of discussion of cars!).

Snd regarding synergy with your system, the folks in my camp generally believe that a streamer, properly implemented, does not have a sonic signature of its own.  That’s established in the analogue realm, which means somewhere between your DAC and your speakers.  Hope that helps.

WiiM Pro, 5v LPS, Roon into a RME ADI-2. Super nice when cascading Cisco switches, Finisar FTLX1475D3BTL transceivers and a short Blue Jeans ethernet cable into the WiiM Pro. 

Before dropping a ton of money, consider using the WiiM Pro as a streamer only with a similar configuration.  

@stievus 

Same with me relative to storage. I’m equally torn about the Rivo. I keep coming back to it since I’ve already got a decent power supply that would work with it - which very much makes a difference.  Alpha Audio had a pretty high opinion of it as long as the power supply is upgraded and you use aes/ebu for the output. Volumio OS  is also unique, in that the plugins offer some advantages. Music Shield can calm down the CPU to reduce jitter, and the app itself offers up sampling options as well. I’ve found both to make a palpable change in SQ overall. 

@mdalton 

It is an Accuphase DP-67, Sony KSS 240A transport. Lots of detail, depth, transparency and so on....

I may be in over my head here, but I don’t understand how you were streaming previously.  If I’m not mistaken, the Accuphase is a CD player (i.e., both a transport and an internal DAC), but it doesn’t have streaming ability does it?  And based upon my advanced research skills (called “Google”), the Sony is an “optical block” associated with a CD transport.  Am I missing something obvious? How have you been streaming Qobuz with that setup?