Best DAC to go with Aurender N100H?

I also run my Aurender (ACS10) thru an EEM DAC2 and it delivers all I could ask in terms of sound; it is the combination I was looking for.  The Aurender Conductor software provides flexibility  and the built-in TEAC drive for ripping is convenient and provides plenty of hard drive storage.

I recommend you consider the Ayre CODEX DAC.  It is excellent and its cost is $1,999.   Please see:

https://www.ayre.com/products/digital/codex/

It operates as a DAC or a Preamp/DAC.   It only has a USB and Toslink inputs.  I strongly recommend you use its balanced XLR cables to your amplifier.  It sounds much better when used with its balanced XLR connections.   

Another option might be the Schiit YGGY DAC.   I hope you are streaming Qobuz hi-res on your Aurender N100H.  Their 24-bit/96 and 24-bit/192 albums are terrific sounding.   Enjoy.  

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

I run the Ambre with Onyx via I2S and it’s fantastic  

Rbstereno, please get your facts straight, we are a dealer for Lumin because the Lumin products are consistantly some of the best sounding and best designed audio products out there...period.

We also sell a ton of great dacs.

If you look at Lumins reviews they are universally rated as making some of the best gear in each of their price points, they are famous for service, support, upgradability via fimrware upgrades.

Lumin is a giant company with resourses much greater than many tiny, tiny audio companies. Their parent company makes most of the cable boxes used in Asia as well as building broadcast video products. 

Lumin's products are based on real engineering not flavor of the month parts and concepts which is why it has taken five years for them to beat their older platform. To this day a five year old Lumin A1 will still outperform many brand new dacs how do we know this because we had an A1 traded in and it still sounded ridiculously musical.

And in terms of your facts about FPGA again totally wrong, many manufactureres used FPGA to hold software, what is or is not relevant is if the company is offering upgrades to that core. 

In the case of Chord whose dacs are FPGA  based they almost never offer upgrades to their software as the code is a mature code honned over many years and there is no reason to change it as it is not possible for Robert Watts to come up with an improved version of the ideas and execution of his transient and time aligned digital filter. 

FPGA is just a way of being able to hold software that is easy to change. 

Lumin has added MQA and was one of the first to support it as well as Roon and they did that via an over the air upgrade!

Other issues is jitter transmitted from a server to a dac, you have a huge reduction in noise and jitter with an all in one streamer/dac not to mention you usually save money, howerver, we have seen in our testing that an Innnous server feeding an ethernet dac over ethernet did sound signfigantly better via the Innous feeding it then via a direct ethernet connection to the router.

As per our any comment, come on how many people are going to pay $2,800.00 for a server and use it with a $300 dac? Common sense means that this person would be looking at a suitable dac priced from $2k-5k.

Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ