Streamers rabbit hole

I also recommend the book by Robert Harley called the complete guide to the high-end Audio. It explains all the terminology, concepts and approaches

@rtilden sorry for not responding - I was attending a festival this weekend and listening to Shamekia Copland and Christone “Kingfish” Ingram slay the blues live.  I have the same Node N130 and Teddy Pardo combo that you have that I am using with a Furutech power cable and connected to a Chord Qutest DAC via a Chord Company coax cable.  I use it much more often to serve files from an SSD than for streaming at this point, and it all sounds very good to me.

But this is a four box front end I have pieced together over the last few years that takes up a whole 30” shelf on my equipment rack, and if I had to replace it all new it would cost almost five grand, not including the power or RCA cables.  The OP wanted a one box solution under $5k, so I just pointed out that there are a number of streamers with built in DACs that have been mentioned positively in this thread available new or open box under $5k.  I have not had a chance to evaluate any of these streamers compared with my set up.  Looks like you have gotten lots of responses, and it sounds like @ghdprentice has listened to and evaluated many of them and is a big fan of Aurender.

kn

Eversolo just released their T8 dedicated streamer transport today. 

This is a poor time to purchase a DDC. 

Denafrips is a Chinese company and sourcing an Iris or Hermes, or anything Denafrips, is just about impossible at this point. All because of the tax man. There was an Iris at TMR yesterday but it is gone. I would prefer a Hermes. Anyone got one they want to part with?

An Aurender would solve most problems but shelling out that much money for a streamer is hard for me to fathom at this point. Using a computer, I do not need a display or storage, so I would be purchasing the unit based solely on it's jitter reducing capabilities.

I have no doubt that a Hermes feeding my Yggy OG would increase sound quality. I would use USB to Hermes and AES cable to Yggy. 

If I had my druthers, I would just call it a day and buy a Chord Dave, but even that was released in 2016, the same year as my Yggy, so the Chord folks should be readying a release of a Chord Dave 2 soon, right? What am I looking at, 15K?