Thoughts on Moving Up From Denafrips Terminator / GAIA DDC

air and resolution

suggest try a weiss or an upper chord dac (w m scaler preferably)

Ditch the streaming services and get a transport/CD's. Physical media is where it's at! Streaming services cannot be trusted to offer the best uncompressed audio files. You are at their mercy! They need to use compression to fit their files on the digital pipeline.

I also prefer CD's , though streaming for exploring and background stuff...

streaming is worth it in my view, despite some of the challenges

cd's at redbook resolution has its own

the world of music at one’s fingertips is the immense benefit to streaming, truly a music lover’s paradise

I don’t stream from sites like Tidal. My SMG i5 is a file server and I’ve around 7tb of music stored on a usb drive. I’ve a mix of 44.1 through DSD512, etc.
I use an old OPPO 95 as a CD transport for occasional use of physical media, but mostly I rip files from cd to the network storage or occasionally download hi-res music from sites like HD Tracks.

I like the look of the Weiss dacs but haven’t seen a used one show up in weeks, other than a unit that’s located in Europe.

 I really like the look of the Berkeley Reference dacs, though they seem to attract mixed reviews. Not that looks are important, but the Berkeley dacs do appear to be rock solid designs.

 I’m open to all options but I’ve made a LOT of system changes in the past year or two and I’m tiring of the process. So I’d really like to hold out for something that’s widely considered to be an improvement on the Terminator, and not something that’s just the latest flavor of the month.