Waiting for @jasonbourne52 to appear and tell you all you need is a 100.00 DAC connected to a 50.00 DVD player....
To be fair, an iPad with a dongle into some RCAs, is what I often use to check the system.
If one doesn’t like that, then it is not certain that they would line other higher $ digital approaches over the VPI scout sound.
The rest of the gear is nice.
You will need:
fast Internet, a nice power supply for your router, a fancy ethernet cable from your router to your system, a fancy ethernet switch (English electric switch 8) , a fancy ethernet cable from the switch to your server (wolf audio systems luna r or better), a fancy usb cable from your server to your dac (t+a dac8dsd or better) , nice powercord for your dac, and xlr to your preamp. Also youll need a roon subscription and a Qobuz subscription.
At 44k, and 2 channels at 24 bits, it becomes around 2 Mbits. One does not need gigabit ethernet for the low bandwidth of audio.
For a time I thought about getting a new CD player that has digital inputs ( mine does not ) and add the streamer and hard drive to it. Based on reading I think perhaps that is not the best approach but I am not opposed to that either.
It may be a good approach.
One can run Roon on a NUC, or use some other embedded Roon player, etc…
But one can also run that type of setup into a DAC, and then into the preamp.
I would not push it out of the solution space just yet.
