I’m not surprised that audiotroy recommended a Lumin, he is a dealer for them. A little slanted recommendation in my opinion.
As for the comment, an aurender will sound good with any dac, bs! A source component will only sound as good as the weakest link in the chain of components. Any aurender teamed up with a $300 dac will sound like a $300 dac. There are many decent music servers out there, Lumin is a decent server.
As for a 1 box solution, I would stay away from that. If you would have bought a 1 box solution a year ago and then wanted MQA for example, you would have to replace the whole box. If you would buy a FPGA based dac, you could get MQA probably for free. There are changes in the digital world, higher resolution formats, MQA, and who knows what’s being worked on that we don’t know about, find a good streamer (if you want to go down this path) and get a very good FPGA dac
As for the comment, an aurender will sound good with any dac, bs! A source component will only sound as good as the weakest link in the chain of components. Any aurender teamed up with a $300 dac will sound like a $300 dac. There are many decent music servers out there, Lumin is a decent server.
As for a 1 box solution, I would stay away from that. If you would have bought a 1 box solution a year ago and then wanted MQA for example, you would have to replace the whole box. If you would buy a FPGA based dac, you could get MQA probably for free. There are changes in the digital world, higher resolution formats, MQA, and who knows what’s being worked on that we don’t know about, find a good streamer (if you want to go down this path) and get a very good FPGA dac