Looking for a true upgrade in sound quality

You may have others who agree here, but your statements are contrary to the knowledge of a massive majority of network engineers, physicists, and other scientists, etc.

@jji666  Classic denial.  And yeah, there are tons of people here who agree with me.  The vast, vast majority of very experienced audiophiles here have achieved significant improvements with upgraded network switches/cables and streamers because everything matters when it comes to streaming and matters a lot, so make no mistake that you are in the extreme minority here when you say they have no sound and it is critical that the newbies also understand that.  

Try Roon and see how that sounds.  

Agreed.  Roon is very good for tweaking sound because of its DSP capabilities.  However you have to have a fairly powerful server for some of the DSP, depending on what you want to do. 

Roon is also great because it allows for a thin, non-high powered endpoint (streamer) to be used such that any heavy processing is done on the server, which can be in another room, so no ambient noise and limits theoretical concerns about any electrical aspect of the streamer (if you buy into that). 

At Deer Creek Audio we believe Dirac Live calibration is one of the most powerful ways to gain dimension and accuracy in both the time and frequency domains.

Having performed Dirac calibrations on many high-end systems we have found than there are fundamental systems issue about 30% of the time. So we always validate the systems before proceeding.

In any case we recommend getting back to the basics and verifying the following:

• Component Settings
• Cabling Integrity
• Speaker Driver Operation
• Speaker Polarity 
• Relative Speaker Level Settings
• Crossover Function

@soix

+1

Backwash

++1 Soix, EVERYTHING matters

If you are on the DAC upgrade path, I doubt you could do better than a Denafrips Terminator Plus DAC (NOT the Terminator II as the Plus is a large upgrade).

There is one right now used for $4,900 on US Audio Mart, which has a list price of $7,600. It is a little over 2 years old, so the model has many of the latest upgrades....and the firmware is upgradeable via a flash. Also the unit has a 3 year fully transferrable warranty, so has a little under a year left on the warranty

If I had the money, and the DAC was my next upgrade, I would buy that unit (and I am a long time Denafrips owner of several of their products)