Playback Designs MPD6 or Bricasti M21?

Bricasti network card is a renderer and not a streamer. This means you need a Roon Core or a UPnP support player like MConnect to be able to stream music. 
I used both Mconnect and Roon with M3 and preferred Roon for both the sound and UI. Ultimately the Bricasti network renderer was not a competition for a dedicated Aurender streamer. However, it’s a nice to have that can hold you over until you get a better streamer or if you’re between streamers and want to continue to listen. It doesn’t sound bad.

Okay, I am confused -- particularly since the Bricasti M21 and the PlayBack Designs MDP-6 are the two DACs I have been most impressed by, albeit based only on what I have read. I thought that the M21 was "good to go", allowing me to plug in and then be fully able to listen to streams of music from Qobuz and Tidal. Apparently, that is not so. I also have a Roon Nucleus+ on my network. Will I still need to purchase yet another component before I can utilize those two services if I were to buy an M21?

Bricasti is Roon ready so just connect Ethernet cable to have it sit on the same network as your roon core and you are good to go for tidal, qobuz and local library files if you have any. You can also use nucleus as a streamer feeding M21 via USB but I doubt that’s going to be as good as just using the M21 as roon end point. 
 

What I was trying to say above is there are dedicated streamers that perform better sonically than the Bricasti network renderer. Do you have to buy a dedicated streamer? No. 

@acurus,

I like my Bricasti M21 DAC very much because it sounds great. The DAC has a 24-bit delta sigma DAC, a 20-bit ladder DAC and true 1 bit DSD for DSD content. It includes an Ethernet connection so the M21 is recognized as a DNLA device and becomes a powerful media renderer. I switched my music streaming to using Audirvana Studio software on my MAC Laptop Computer (14-inch MacBook Pro M2 12 Core/19CPU). I use Audirvana Studio remote on my iPad to find the albums, playlists, etc. My Bricasti M21 DAC connects to the Internet using an Ethernet cable. This setup has resulted in my music being clearer and more open (replaced my Aurender sever). The Audirvana Studio interface is excellent and is easy to use (yes, there is a slight learning curve). The removal of the music streamer and having the Bricasti DAC connect to the Internet and then to my MAC computer has removed a layer from the Music and made it more musical and clearer. I was not expecting this much improvement.

The use of Audirvana Studio App has substantially improved my sound quality very much. As an example of great product support, my Bricasti DAC was upgraded for $1,000. Their MDx board replaced the existing board in the DAC. The next Bricasti upgrade was a free firmware chip program that needed to be inserted into the DAC to complete the upgrade. Both upgrades greatly improved the DAC for a very reasonable cost. This is an example of a company supporting it customers.

To the OP - it's not difficult to home demo these (somewhat harder for the Playback)...why not do that? In typical Audiogon fashion, it seems that half these responses are from folks that don't have direct experience, and the other half is from folks who only have experience with one, in a system v diff from yours.

If you're already inclined towards the Bricasti amps, I'd be inclined towards the Bricasti dac as well.

I can tell you, from direct experience, that there is no contest between the stand-alone Bricasti streamer and the current Playback Designs MPS-X (a D to D converter and streamer). The MPS-X is significantly more expensive...and significantly better.

Someone tried to extrapolate what the Playback dac sounds like based on a old-generation Playback digital streamer. That's a weird way to think about things. It's not hard to find good digital design. Digital has been very good for a while. What's hard is to find excellent analog output stages. We're talking about digital...to analog...converters.

When dcs came out with the "Apex" upgrades, the digital didn't change much. It was really about upgrading their previously lackluster analog output stages.

I'm getting distracted from the point...which is just listen for yourself.