Good DACs have known benefits, But what About Streamers

Wrong Topic area ;-)

Frankly I cannot definitively identify much if any real difference in the streamers I use whereas I can with most everything else even ICs and power cords in some cases. No two DAC configurations seem to ever sound the same for sure.  However streamer connection type often does matter, especially if older lesser quality wireless connections are used.

After years using a Mac mini (Amarra/Audirvana/HQPlayer) and/or Bluesound Node 2 I moved to a Sonore microRendu. I'm using Asset UPnP and mconnect. The increase in fidelity is significant .. jaw-dropping in fact. I have no experience with higher-end streamers like Aurender so I can't say how the microRendu compares.

if you like the user interface on the Sonos, get the Wyred4Sound Mod and run it through the DAC in your pre...I have one and the sound is excellent

I’m digging in right now. Here’s the deal. With SPDIF, the connection to a DAC is synchronous, and the transport (sender) is the clock. So your DAC is limited to the quality of the incoming signal, improved by whatever jitter reduction it can do. Jitter has a huge analog impact on pulse-amplitude modulation, and therefore on the output.
Now, USB and Ethernet are asynchronous. They just send stuff to a buffer, and the DAC clocks the samples. Much better and less dependent on the sender. However, noise is still a big issues and some folks i trust report differences beyond that - having to do with the quality of the pulse-shape of the USB. never heard this about Ethernet, mostly because its so hard to separate out.
So, does the streamer matter in a network? Not much IMNSHO. But does the networked device that takes in the Ethernet, and spits out the USB matter? Yes apparently, although it should matter less than SPDIF, ** IF AND ONLY IF ** the DAC has a good clock signal.
Bottom line:
Streamer - not so much
Network adapter- yes but somewhat vague. Its about jitter and digital noise that impacts jitter i would guess
DAC - yes and it is even more critical that it can generate a good, low jitter clock, since there is none being sent to it (unless you use some franken-protocol like I^2S (inter-IC-signal) which sends signal, ground and clock and was never meant to leave the motherboard.
I plan to get ROON, put it on a low noise, fan-less, trimmed OS computer (aka ROCK) and then use a good USB DAC, and for my (excellent) legacy DACs that use SPDIF only, a quality USB-SPDIF converter like Schiit (new) or a network device like the ALLO.
Its a quagmire. Welcome to the slime.
G