The one thing that’s factual and clearly knowable is what exactly is happening to the digital data stream in your two use cases. Without knowing that for sure, I believe it’s difficult to make a decision on what you want for a streamer, because your benchmark is not just the cd transport, it’s the delta (difference) between your old streamer and the transport. That’s why I was so persistent in asking you what your old streamer was. I’m pretty sure my analysis is correct, so it’s up to you to figure out what to do with that knowledge.
But if I am correct, and your aural memory is accurate as to your preferences (always a challenge for me), then my advice would be to get a streamer that does 0 processing to the native data stream. That doesn’t mean you’re limited to 44.1k, it just means you would be hearing the music in the format that it was mastered to be played in, thru the DAC that you like. (This goes back to what @benanders may have been trying to get at a while ago, btw.)
As I said originally, I don’t think you need to spend $5k or anything close to that to get what you want. And I think that some of the high cost streamers may do alot of processing to the signal which may be the exact opposite of what you want.
Final point, I promise. To me, the Sonos example underscores the point I’ve been trying to make on this and several other threads. We all knew the Sonos DAC was mediocre at best back in the day, so every self-respecting audiophile who just started streaming with Sonos got themselves an external DAC. And then some folks pointed out that even as a transport, the Sonos was deeply flawed cuz it had tons of jitter. So a cottage industry arose of companies performing mods on the Sonos to address the known flaws. In certain cases, with some DACs, such mods were unnecessary and made no difference. In my view, this fundamental dynamic as it relates to current streamers is unchanged, almost 20 years later.
Good luck, and enjoy the journey.
