My experience with streamers, all with Yggdrasil LIM
phone/ipad: sounded ok at the time but in fact very harsh and noisy commpared to dedicated streamer
Raspberry pi with digione signature hat and Shanti: huge improvement but still harsh especially with like say violins, and doesn't handle complex music that well. That being said, I was pretty happy with it for a while especially for the price.
Lumin U2 mini: A very good streamer, better at streaming than the Aurender N100h but the Aurender N100h sounds much better than the Lumin if it is using local files. Not a fan of the app. No local storage which to my ears so far sounds better than streaming. You have to use minimserver which is a pain. dont know if NAS might be better. It does do ROON which is nice but the sound quality is better with the Lumin app. I have a hard time finding my local files with roon, and they don't really sound any better than streaming, which is perhaps no surprise as they are still coming in over your local network. I am finding roon also a pain, and can find new music etc. other ways including just using the qobuz app to explore things.
Aurender N100H: sounds amazingly good with local files. But streaming is only OK.
N150: Local file playing a bit better than N100H. Streaming is much improved over the 100H, but local files are still I think significantly better, more density. The app is pretty good, could be better especially its integration with Qobuz. It is annoying not to be able to search Qobuz favorites, but you can add favorites to the Aurender local library, but still not so easy to fiind sometimes.
I am now wondering if the N200 or N10 might be better especially at streaming, or if the rest of my system is not good enough for it to make a difference. Yggy LIM and Raven Blackhawk with no really expensive interconnects.
