Pls Recommend Streamer Under $500 for Tidal “HiFi”

Thanks everyone, I’m going to pick up a Bluesound Node2i today. 

First impressions on unboxing the Node 2i:

”I wonder how much this fancy box and cloth bag that the Node 2i came in cost me?”

“I hope the crappy throw-away interconnect cables that are included didn’t cost me much”

”Why would they fold the CAT5e cable?”

Grrrrr...

Setup and First listening impressions of the Bluesound Node 2i:

Setup was a breeze. The iPhone app immediately found the Node 2i, which I had plugged into the same network that my wireless access point resides on. After applying updates the unit came to life and I added my Tidal account. Strangely, there wasn’t a menu option to choose Tidal MQA. 

I found menu navigation in the iPhone app fairly inorganic. There didn’t appear to be a way to jump between music playing sessions and individual device tweaks without navigating all the way to the root menu. There should be a simpler way. 

Sound quality seemed good on a non-critical listening session with a pair of Yamaha powered studio monitors connected. I am unclear about the symbology I’m the track list: on the right side of the list, the second last column shows a grey circle with a squiggly line, perhaps the intent was to look like an oscilloscope display of an audio signal. Does that have any bearing over whether the stream is MQA or not?

Thanks Big_Greg!

Please explain “first unfold”. 

Seems that many high end DACs don’t support MQA. Is it too early to expect widespread support of MQA?