3D Labs streamer?

Ok with the big players but remember few years back they were newcomers too that hardly anyone knew of. I am all for supporting innovative companies that give you value for money. Of course the risk is you may get a half baked product or later no support if the said company goes under.

Anyway coming back to the question to give you a little more information about my system, the new streamer will be connected to a Trinnov ST2 Hifi that does DRC and that feeds a Weiss DAC202 which performs best with firewire (remember it?) or AES/EBU inputs. As the source, I am currently using a slightly optimised PC with a firewire card or a Teac VRDS CD player.

I agree with streamers best to go with the big boys. Little value that boutique brands can add and in fact they may struggle to keep up .

I ended up with a Cambridge Evo 150 that replaced separate monoblock amps, pre-amp, phono pre, DAC and streamer. Very happy!

Agree with the support aspect.   Crucial in this arena of products

Smaller companies making small digital products are a dime a dozen and come and go with the wind, at minimum they provide little to no customer service. Go with one of the major companies.

Matt M

There are so many options! One minute I settle on a Lumin U2 mini, the next is an Auralic, then a used DCS bridge and so on. Then you hear of new ones coming to the market recently and the search goes on. At this rate I will never purchase anything! Of course then it is all the network 'enhancements'. 

Not familiar with those two but having gone through the exercise of updating my streaming recently, it became apparent that features and reliability (also of course cost) are probably the two most important things that differentiate streamers these days, way more so than sound quality, at least in cases where an outboard DAC is used. You really have to do some homework to sort through all the features that vary from product to product and which matter to you. Just my advice...

@fuzztone Right, that was another streamer I am considering, it is Pi2AES based one, is it not?

Order the new MagnaMano-Farad in AES-EBU. Looks like a giant killer.