Best cost-no-object streamer or streamer-dac combo

Audio Gear Talk
21

Whew! Guess I’ll have to put one of the kids on the black market. :slight_smile:

To answer most of the above, it would probably help to put some of this into context. My first foray into higher price audiophilia started maybe about seven or eight years ago; I have always been a musician and music lover, but finances dictated I was toting around a Harman Kardan receiver, CD player, and Infinity bookshelf speakers since about 1996. They were great for the price and lasted forever. I upgraded to some Polk towers from the Crutchfield scratch and dent section somewhere along the way.

When my resources improved, I purchased a Vinnie Rossi LIO integrated, with DAC and phonostage. I really liked Vinnie’s Redwine Audio products, which were battery powered and had a pretty black background. When those were discontinued, Vinnie started hand building the LIO, which runs on ultracapacitors and is modular, upgradable to the newer amp, DAC etc. Whenever Roon first came out, what maybe about six years ago, I bought the lifetime subscription and happily dumped iTunes. I was streaming to the DAC with a microrendu, and constantly had problems getting the two devices to recognize each other on the USB input. I have never had problems with the optical input. I will spare you all the details of that charade.

I am currently using Vinnie’s L2iSE, which is (at least based on my budget) an end-game integrated, with a modular phonostage and DAC with a Triode preamp and MOSFET output. I’m driving Volti Rivals, which apropos of nothing are goshdarn outstanding and IMHO crush speakers more than double their price; I picked them out at the Florida Expo last year after hearing many different choices. I have always loved horns for what I listen to, Jazz and Acoustic, etc. Greg is now making a slightly smaller version of the Rival called the Razz, and they’re reviewed in this month’s Stereophile, they run about 6k and are -almost- as good as the Rival for about a third of the price.

Anyhoo, my current setup is the VR L2iSE and the Rivals. I’m currently streaming Roon through a Bryston BDP-3, which I specifically bought to upgrade my main listening room’s Roon access. It has USB output as well as SPDIF. In order to get the Bryston and DAC to recognize each other, I have to go into the Bryston’s graphic user interface whenever I turn it on and change the output; I’m not sure why it won’t default to output whatever is plugged in. If I turn both units off, I have to go back into the interface again. So, for a while I left both units on while turning off the amp. Even then, for some bizarre reason, the units may intermittently not recognize each other when using USB input and output. The optical and SPDIF inputs on the DAC seem unaffected, and I’ve used multiple other Roon endpoints through the optical input without issue.

I don’t have another device right now that outputs both BNC and USB, so I’m hoping to upgrade to an end-game (rotfl) streamer that has both. Whether or not it also has a DAC or Roon Core as well is mostly for convenience sake, as well as to pay for a 10k piece of kit I would want to sell my Nucleus and Bryston to offset the cost.

That’s the pickle I find myself in right now, but I’m sure there’s more. I will try to answer some of the specific questions above tonight.

Thanks all!

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22

RoonReady makes things easy and gets the most flexibility out of the device.
If you get a RoonReady streamer (only), we also refer to this as a RoonReady Bridge. For the money, it is basically just using the RAAT protocol to pump bits into your DAC. By the same token, Roon doesn’t really know what the DAC is (AFAIK).
The RoonReady streamer/DAC takes it a step further, and now Roon knows what the DAC is and can communicate with it bi-directionally. So, for my Analog DAC I originally had just USB. MSB had a MSB Asio driver that Roon spoke with. Worked fine. Adding the RoonReady Network Renderer meant Roon could now talk directly to the DAC, and vice-versa. New features appeared. The most important is that Roon can now directly control the excellent volume control on the MSB DAC. In so doing, my Roon Client gets real time feedback of the attenuation level on the DAC’s volume control.
IMO, this streamer/DAC combination is the sweet spot. Given price and performance, I’ll keep it for a really long time and get the most functionality possible. I’m not tied down by any superfluous streamer software or hardware.
There are a LOT of excellent (more than just really good) products in this range ($5-$10K). One chokes hard when you write the check, but there is no looking back and saying ‘I wish…’.
Oh, and buy used if you can!

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Thank you @Bill_Janssen. Yeah, I wasn’t sure about that.
But I’m not so sure ‘you would seem to have the equivalent of a RoonReady streamer-DAC’. The ethernet connection allows bidirectional communication between the DAC and core. I immediately noticed new functions I didn’t have before just plugging DAC into a RoonBridge by USB.
I suppose some of this is vendor specific.

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Frankly, I’m not sure of it, either. If I had more DACs I could test it more thoroughly. And I see that the differences in settings I had thought I’d seen were just that Roon now knows what settings to use by default for a DAC that it knows about. I think I’m going to delete my post, as there’s no sense in keeping half-baked info around.

26

@danny has pointed out that the purpose of the Roon Bridge is to extend Roon into the streamer so that it can get at the hardware hooked up to the streamer. Now, some devices have control points that are only accessible via Ethernet – you can stream audio to them over USB, but not control them. I would imagine that for such a device, yes, USB alone would not suffice. I notice that my Mytek DAC has two USB interfaces when connected, one an audio channel, and one a control channel.

27

It slipped my mind that Roon recommends splitting the core and endpoint for obvious reasons. Apropos of nothing it stands to reason that solid state multi-terabyte drives will obviate this in the future if passive heat dissipation is adequate.

Thank you all so much for your input. I learn so much from these threads.

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I’m not sure it’s ever that simple! There will always be the potential for noise to couple into the DAC from the digital processing that takes place upstream, so there is still an argument for decoupling.

29

If anything deserves the label “first-world problem”, this is it, lol. (From someone who doesn’t live in the “first world” and for whom all of these products are unavailable unless imported with a 120% tariff.)

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30

Good point, I should have said drives -may- mitigate…

31

I don’t know how to quote posts here, but I agree wholeheartedly that this is a first-world problem. Before I could afford high-end stuff, I was rocking a self-built RPi and a Circa-1996 Harman Kardon with scratch and dent Crutchfield Polk towers. :slight_smile:

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My first ‘stereo’ was from K-Mart.

33

I think it comes down to this: the “best” is the one that you like, and the only way to get a clear idea is to try as many permutations as you can. I have a Roon Nucleus, a dCS Network Bridge and a Nagra Classic DAC. For some time, I’ve felt that streaming through the dCS unit sounded better than direct USB from the Nucleus to the DAC (and I’ve said so on this forum). Then I changed the USB cable (to Audioquest Cinnamon), and now I’m not so sure. USB from the Nucleus to the DAC sounds great ( I think it took some settling in, but this could be my imagination). The dCS brings, perhaps, a bit of warmth, but maybe at the expense of some sparkle.

Make of that what you will. I suppose my recommendation would be to hang on to the Nucleus until you are sure that something else is better.

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34

Is there a reason you left out a Linn Klimax?
Ok it‘s over 15k but then there is still a Linn Akurate DSM that would fit the bill.

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35

The current cut is down to either the Lumin X1 or the Trinnov Amethyst. Decisions, Decisions! :slight_smile:

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36

You certainly can’t go wrong with the Lumin.
Do you have a local dealer or are you buying ‘deaf’?

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I live in North Havana so the closest dealer for anything is Miami. I’m going to have to wing it and use their good grace return period, with which I haven’t had a problem yet, so we’ll see.

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Sonore Signature Rendu SE systemOptique/Aqua La Scala MK II Optologic DAC

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39

Cuba?
I doubt you’ll be unhappy with it.

40

Once you include a DAC in the cost-no-object view, there are a ton of things that really shine. But one product that really stands out for me is the Orchard Audio PecanPi Streamer. The integral streamer is essentially an RPI, but the DAC is an original design that is truly exceptional. I’m using two in my home and just love what they do. So perhaps these might fall better in the cost-is-an-object category, but it punches way above its price point.

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You certainly will not be disappointed with the Lumin. As I said at the beginning of the thread, outstanding products and you get great customer support and advice right here from @wklie!

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