Aurender

just like any aspect of the hifi system building game, people speak about their journey, their experience, their system -- with a certain baseline of expectations, skill, experience and budget

people find happiness and excellent sound at many various levels of expense and expertise... that happiness is found at modest levels of system building is a blessing for those who achieve this, while others may push push push, with ever more effort, learning and expense trying to achieve ever higher levels of sonic quality (as they perceive it) ... there is no right or wrong either way, we all enjoy the pursuit our own way, subject to our time, energy, wallet, and disposition

i think the key is no one should judge where anyone else is on the journey and how they achieve musical happiness, how they spend the money and effort and the sonic result achieved... if you are fully satisfied with a bluesound node with an added lps, power to you - but don’t tell others that if they have a grimm, an innuos zen or a roon core+optical rendu that theirs isn’t better (and vice versa) ... let’s just celebrate that everyone can find their ’happy place’

aurender no doubt makes real good stuff, as does innuos, auralic, lumin, red rose, grimm and so on -- roon users can go the nuc/nucleus route with 'a la carte' endpoints such as sonore products, bypassing the expensive all-in-one boxes sold by the 'luxury digital system integrators' named above

each company has worked hard and developed excellent solutions to streaming/digital music management... each of course has also made strategic choices on how to handle the software aspect, and each is wary, to varying degrees, of roon seizing control of the end use customer

i would think given how each company has developed its solutions, each company’s products may favor certain connection protocols, external clocking protocols, and so on... some thus may play better with certain other downstream dacs and how they implement connections ...