Lumin or Aurender

Lumin is way better than Aurender, the bass, mid and high the Lumin performing better than  Aurender. The only thing that Aurender is good which is their internal ssd and ripping of CD directly.

I like the LUMIN U1 Mini. Great streamer. It will do upsampling if you want. It’s a Roon endpoint. It can be modified easily to be powered by an external SBooster LPS. The SQ is great and cost is competitive with other options. It also tends to come up on the secondary market periodically so you can buy one at less than retail and sell it when you want to upgrade. Lastly, LUMIN pushes software updates to your streamer at no additional cost where at least one other popular streamer maker charges for their software updates. 

T2 still competitive?

if wanting a streaming DAC to hook up to one or more hard drives, what else would you look at besides T2, at this point. A year and a half have gone by since this was active. Also, if doing LUMIN, would you do u1 mini and a $2000 DAC, or T2 in one box? 
Also, how much better sound quality are any of these versus using an OPPO UDP-205 as streamer DAC?

 

T2 still competitive?

if wanting a streaming DAC to hook up to one or more hard drives, what else would you look at besides T2, at this point. A year and a half have gone by since this was active. Also, if doing LUMIN, would you do u1 mini and a $2000 DAC, or T2 in one box? 
Also, how much better sound quality are any of these versus using an OPPO UDP-205 as streamer DAC?

 

Aurender bested lumin on every level during the last 2 years.