Add External DAC or Upgrade to a New Streamer / DAC?

Keep the streamer and DAC separate, and sell the Rose and upgrade your streamer when you get the chance.  You’ll be much better off. 

@jdm11

i have not had a hifirose unit in my own system, but it seems that pretty much all reviews of hifirose gear points out that this brand of gear voices their sound on the leaner/clear/crisp side - this is also consistent with the typical sound of a dac section using ess sabre d/a chipset and standard solid state output stage implementation

given the above (and i agree it is more cost effective to upgrade the digital front end these days than a similar good sounding analog front end, so i support your choosing to improve the digital), i would suggest using your hifirose unit as a streamer and feed one of several possible candidate dacs

-- mhdt orchid (modded if possible, but the standard unit is perfectly fine to try)

-- denafrips pontus

-- audio mirror tubador

all three should have a notably warmer tonality, a richness to the sound, without sacrificing too much in the way of treble detail and effortless resolution compared to your hifirose dac section

each of the above appear on the used sites fairly often and can be purchased and resold pretty easily (if necessary) if the trial does not lead to a sound you desire - i especially like the orchid (or similar mhdt tube buffered dacs, they have several models) since you can affect the sound additionally through easy tube rolling

other point i would make is to make sure your internet feed is reasonably well cleansed coming to the streamer... there are plenty of threads on this on this forum, there are numerous cost effective options to do this

good luck have fun

Streamer is a computer and needs to be evaluated as such - mostly by features available in software. DAC is evaluated on quality of a single function it does - digital to analog conversion. Software and features are changing much more often, that is why it makes more sense to separate streamer and DAC. But with that separation you should choose streamer with USB output and DAC with USB input. If there is not USB and you have to use AES/SPDIF/TOSLINK, then to deliver bits perfectly from streamer to DAC you need to choose DAC that has master clock OUTPUT and streamer with master clock INPUT. This is the only solution (other than USB) to make streamer slave to DAC clock.

Ap1-not true. Like others that have stated above, The best interfaces to a dac are Ethernet and i2s. Most dacs don’t include these interfaces except for the better ones. Toslink would be good except it limits what can be sent thru it. Nobody uses coax anymore. Most people will use usb even though it’s flawed, so the user ends up buying all the gimmicks/tweaks to try to make usb better. You don’t see femto clocks, reclock pieces, or usb splitters to separate the power from the data on Ethernet or i2s.

If you’re into reading reviews, check out some of the latest dac reviews where the reviewer stated Ethernet sounded better than usb. Also some of the more expensive dacs don’t even come with usb, as others have stated and documented in reviews.

I2S is equivalent of SPDIF from clocking perspective and only appropriate when DAC supplies clock signal to streamer.

The only audio transport for Ethernet is AES67/Dante. There are not many DACs supporting it on the market and even less number of streamers. In Dante based networks clock distribution is even bigger issue and today likely requires ASRC feature inside DAC to minimize jitter.