Lumin or Aurender

I vetted the Lumin and Aurender and chose the Lumin. Roon compatibility is a must after I learned the hard way with the Sony HAPZ1ES and Logitech Squeezebox about what happens when the manufacturer decides to stop upgrading its OS. Never again.

Lumin had been fantastic about updating Firmware and their customer service is awesome. I use my D2 with a Sbooster power supply and am super happy with the Sonics, especially on hi Rez and upsampled Redbook.

Sony and Logitech are hardly considered leaders in streaming hardware and app associated with their streaming players. I have owned Aurender now for 6 plus years. They have been on top of the updates, very receptive to customer feedback and made great strides with their Conductor app since it’s inception. Outside Roon, Conductor is considered the best free app.

Congratulations to the OP for buying the best sounding streamer currently available :-)

I chose Lumin, very happy with it.

Very happy with Aurender. Clearly better than bluesound node. The app is excellent. I also recently bought NAD M10 and quite impressed with that little amp. The app BluOS isn’t as sophisticated as Aurender app. 

Lumin is way better than Aurender, the bass, mid and high the Lumin performing better than  Aurender. The only thing that Aurender is good which is their internal ssd and ripping of CD directly.

I like the LUMIN U1 Mini. Great streamer. It will do upsampling if you want. It’s a Roon endpoint. It can be modified easily to be powered by an external SBooster LPS. The SQ is great and cost is competitive with other options. It also tends to come up on the secondary market periodically so you can buy one at less than retail and sell it when you want to upgrade. Lastly, LUMIN pushes software updates to your streamer at no additional cost where at least one other popular streamer maker charges for their software updates. 

T2 still competitive?

if wanting a streaming DAC to hook up to one or more hard drives, what else would you look at besides T2, at this point. A year and a half have gone by since this was active. Also, if doing LUMIN, would you do u1 mini and a $2000 DAC, or T2 in one box? 
Also, how much better sound quality are any of these versus using an OPPO UDP-205 as streamer DAC?

 

T2 still competitive?

if wanting a streaming DAC to hook up to one or more hard drives, what else would you look at besides T2, at this point. A year and a half have gone by since this was active. Also, if doing LUMIN, would you do u1 mini and a $2000 DAC, or T2 in one box? 
Also, how much better sound quality are any of these versus using an OPPO UDP-205 as streamer DAC?

 

Aurender bested lumin on every level during the last 2 years. 
 

I went through the same process a couple of time.  In the end, determined I needed a dedicated music server, streamer and DAC.  Decided to get a DAC / Streamer combo to cut down on cables and avoid the USB questions.  I run ROON and source music from Qobuz and my personal online music library.  Pretty much committed to streaming.  A bit over your budget (maybe not preowned) but I ended up with:

Bacasti M3 w/ network card - looked at Lumin but decided to stay local.

Small Green Computer - sonicTransporter i5 w/ 4TB SSD

Overall I'm really happy and back to listening and discovering music instead of chasing equipment. 

I’d love to hear opinions on where we stand now on these models, Lunin T2, T3, X1 and others like Bricasti M3, etc.

How do they rank versus what has come out since this discussion was active a few years ago.