Streamers and software

Watch for someone here who does not own either Streamer W or Streamer I but keeps criticizing W while praising I. This type of biased comment should be banned here to avoid misleading audiogoners.

Just playing devil’s advocate here. Your post made it sound like you were happy with the Node’s sound just fine, especially after installing a LPS, and it was working perfectly with all your Favorites on Amazon, but for some reason you switched to Qobuz from Amazon. Why? Does Qobuz REALLY sound significantly (not marginally) better than Amazon? If it is Qobuz that is buggy, why not simply switch back to Amazon and save yourself $2000 to $4000, or are you just itching for a new toy? Nothing wrong with wanting something better, and yes, maybe the DACs in some of the ones you are considering will be better than your external TOPPING D90 AKM.

There seems to be a significant number of people on this forum who want a great streamer without any DAC built-in whatsoever, not even a marginal "convenience" DAC. They'd rather use an external DAC of their own choosing. 

I’m just wondering if you’d get more bang for your bucks by switching back to something that was working fine, and instead, spend the bucks to upgrade your DAC.

  I recently purchased a used Innuos Pulse Mini with a Teradak  LPS in excellent condition for $950. I paired it with a Schiit Yiggy DAC and am pleased with the sound quality. I use the Innuos app to stream Tidal, Qbuzz and Radio Paradise. The Innuos app imported all my saved favorites, albums and song lists from my Tidal and Qbuzz accounts without issue. After a few days it wouldn’t recognize the Yiggy via USB. I contacted Innuos customer support and explained USB not recognized but SPDIF was fine. Their support said it was a failing USB card in my Yiggy and to contact Schiit. Now that’s customer support. I plan on upgrading to the Pulse this spring. Regards, Mike B. 

@daledeee1, I’m all about the seamless integration of my music into the usability of the software that plays it. Roon undoubtedly has the best streaming software on the market right now IMO. People say it’s too expensive. Okay then let’s do the simple math. Roon costs around $15 a month. So that’s $0.50 a day to listen to whatever I want, in any room in my house or away from it, from a catalogue of literally millions of high-res tracks and hundreds of thousand of albums to choose from, without sorting through my hundreds of records, tapes, and CDs. 
 

I use a Roon Nucleus music server with its own Sbooster power supply. All that the little intel chip inside does is locate tracks and albums on Qobuz that I control from any of my Apple devices. That’s it. Nothing fancy about it. 

+1 on a used Aurender and the Conductor app.