Streamer Recommendations

The eversolo a 10 is out now 3600$ have not heard it yet but I like my a8.they are a great bang for the buck.fairly easy to use.enjoy the hunt.my a8 was 1800$  and I thought worth it 

When I got an external streamer 8 years ago (instead of using Pure Music and Audirvana), I auditioned Auralic, Aurender, and Lumin, and bought the Auralic Aries with the Lightning DS software. SQ was better and the Lightning DS software was far superior. Since I had a very good external dac, I used the usb interface and started buying all the usb tweaks/gimmicks to make it sound better, some did, most didn’t.

Fast forward and bought a top tier dac that uses Ethernet and I2S with both superior to USB and i2s being the best. Since I’m not a fan of using a server that runs Roon or audirvana in my audio room (runs in another part of the house), I use a streamer that accepts data from the server thru the network, and galvanic isolates the signal going out i2s to the dac, that’s its only function I life.

The software that reads the files is the main contributor to how good the music sounds and it’s the software that allows how easy it is to navigate thru your music. Audirvana still holds the lead IMO, which is a little bit better than Roon. But since Roon offers a better interface plus now Roon ARC so I can stream to our cars so I got rid of Sirius/xm, I use Roon.

@rbstehno can you explain how use use Roon and stream in your car then not require SiriusXM? That seems like a nice savings. 👌

I own an Auralic Aries S1 streamer with separate PSU. It seems to sound very good to me, connected to a Chord MScaler + TT2. Has anyone else tried it?

I love my Aurrender N100 and pair it with a DCS Debussy.