Suggestions for a streamer only (I have a great DAC)

Hey Guys,

Thanks so much for all the great advice and suggestions.  I have a wonderful foundation for my search.

I will take the next few weeks to try and acquire many of the recommended streamers (and look into Roon) to make a decision.

I will keep you apprised of my search,

Dave (naperaudio) 

At the XFi Premium show in Holland 2019 I visited the room that Aurender and dCS were sharing. The room was busy but eventually got a chance to talk to the dCS rep.  We were discussing the Network Bridge when the Aurender rep. joined us and to my surprise agreed that the dCS unit was better!

Look here:

I have an purchased an Optical Rendu from Small Green Computer. This is an excellent device a major upgrade for any high end DAC.  It retimes the signal and improves Red Book and extend rate music. The music sounds as good as playing the CD or better.

Jim 

The obvious solution is an Auralic Aries G2.1 streamer.

Auralic put extended effort into their wifi implementation to make it quieter and more consistent than ethernet. You can use ethernet but the wifi is great and in fact better. It has a 1gb cache into which it streams all inputs and dejitters and reclocks incoming. Additionally, if you are Tidal HiFi oriented, Auralic developed their own proprietary software to process MQA without using the MQA license, and it sounds better. Also the free Auralic Lightning DS library playback app has fewer bugs and better sound than Roon does today.

In my experience, the Auralic Aries G2.1 makes any DAC you connect to it sound better, regardless of price. I use it to feed a Bricasti M21 Platinum.

Phil

Roon Nucleus with a Farad super 3 PSU! Forget about the rest!