Do I Need a Dedicated Streamer?

I have a streamer/dac, lumin x1, and A nucleus for roon. And this connects into my Gat cj pre-amplifier. The lumin is superb and using a separate Dac which I have I wanted to avoid due to all the additional interconnect crap and all the temptation to periodically replace the dac. I don’t find this necessary anymore and see no value in doing it. So the inclusion of a dac within the streamer in this case ideal and it took a while to find it and was well worth the search.

a Streamer does mystical things that most have no clue about. The nucleus houses an operating system necessary to operate roon. And then you got the endpoint within the streamer that again does mystical things to allow all the necessary machinations to transform Data flow coming in from the nucleus. I think it Hass to do with a bitstream and clocking and changing the compression rates and all kinds of crazy stuff and no one really understands except those few who actually do.

Do you need a streamer to do quality work on your music? probably yes.

@rick_n Thank you for that response. I will definitely be trying out your Tidal suggestion since it is essentially free.

In the meantime, I will continue doing more research on the topic (obviously all of the responses here are a major help as well.

I appreciate all of the responses. Now that it is clear that I do in fact need a streamer to take really complete my system. I am curious if there is a numerical percentage that could be attached to the level of improvement I would experience if I were to go from Airplay to a dedicated device such as a Lumin D2?

I am still a bit of a novice when it comes to all of the streaming platforms but will venture out and give the others such as Roon a try. I hope to report back in a few months with a solid conclusion on my findings and an awesome streamer to boot!

Give Roon a try first. Install Roon Core on your mac mini and link to Qobuz or Tidal from it. Then use your Hegel as Roon end point. It will be an improvement over airplay with more coherent and clear presentation.
Then if you want to try a streamer, Lumin U series (pure streamers) is a good starting point. The D2 is a streamer/DAC combo by the way. Lumin is Roon ready and you’ll be able to use it as a Roon end point or use its UI which unfortunately is pretty clunky. All this is easy to set up. 
The real improvement and a big step up will be when you use a streamer connected to an outboard DAC. Your Hegel built in DAC is decent enough to start with though. It’s fun to explore. Huge potential there depending on how much you’re willing to spend. Enjoy the journey!

Not sure if installing roon is going to be of value for the sound quality unless you use some of the dsp included as part of Roon, which I don’t find very appealing. I think the overlay of this on top of qobuz maybe on the neutral side.

Streaming direct from tidal or qobuz is just as good or maybe even better. Also the lumin Interface is quite good as far as sound is concerned, although the Interface itself is horrifying to use and requires a bit of a learning curve, and roon is so much better and easier to deal with.

The lumin ap I'm not sure you knew this but was designed by monkeys. I just wish they would've spent more time and considered human involvement when using it because I think it has promise due to sound quality being a little bit better than roon.