Lumin D2 Dac/Streamer Vs 2021 Node/Denafrips Ares ii or Chord Qutest

The U1 Mini sounds like it would potentially be a nice fit for me! I love the fact it shares the same design features with the other Lumin streamers/Dacs as they are the most beautiful on the market today imo.
However, one of my biggest concerns with any streamer is constant connectivity issues and frequent dropouts, as Acaciaavenue and others have experienced. My time is limited for at-home listening, and constant disconnecting/reconnecting would really suck the fun out of it. I recently upgraded to the latest Verizon Gigabit modemn and mesh network extender so  I will mess around with that a little this weekend and see how stable it is. Luckily, if I did go the U1 mini route, it would be running on the mesh extender, which isn't incredibly far from the modem. Acacia, thanks for pointing out the D2 is not Tidal connect compatible, as that's a bit of a deal-breaker for me. I saw Lumin listed on the Tidal connect supported devices page and just assumed being the D2 is a newish model it would have been supported. It makes me wonder if the U1 Mini or any Current Lumin Devices will be compatible with Spotify Hifi once that's officially released. 

Spencer, I most certainly plan on phasing out airplay and Itunes classic out down the line once I'm settled in with my new system. Keep in mind that a lot of the non-streaming source material I listen to is 320KPS mp3 quality, so I'm unsure how much quality degradation I'm experiencing using airplay. This is one of the reasons I plan to integrate a transport eventually so I can rebuy a lot of the music I listen to on CD that isn't available in higher quality digital formats.

I definitly miss playing actual CD's and I don't plan on rebuying my entire music library again. Just stuff that isn't available in higher quality streaming formats elsewhere. With the prices of CD'S so low it would be cheaper for me to rebuy what I wanted instead of downloading. I haven't really explored the "other means" of finding high quality Flac files. I've been using soulseek for a long time and FLAC formats are slim pickings for what I listen to. 

So since the D2 and U1 Mini are around the same price I might as well just stick with the D2 and just by-pass it to use as a streamer but still have the option to play around with the internal D2 dac if I wanted.

Hi Hambon. Do you have the qutest? I'm a bit concerned about how it would do with the type of music mentioned above and poor source/lower quality formats. I'm basing this all off reviews and user observations though. The Ares just seems like it would be more flexible in that regard and maybe a better fit for Rock oriented music.

@audphile1 Would you consider the qutest  a good all rounder in terms of good performance regardless of genre and source quality? Do you listen to any rock/electronic oriented music?