The time has come and I request advice...

@2psyop Out of curiosity, what digital cable are you using between the Node X and your Denafrips? What cables are you using in the rest of your system? And what sonic chracteristics of your digital playback are you currently unhappy with... what do you want to achieve with the upgrade?

I am an Aurender dealer and just got the Node X as a trade in. Last night I demoed through a headphone stack between the Aurender N200 and the Node X expecting for the N200 to outright blow the Node X away. There was no doubt the N200 was better, but the Node X has definitely impressed me more than past Bluesound units. The difference would be as great as the Aurender N150, though it would still be an improvement.

Given a look at your virtual system and the performance tiers of your products, it may be worthwhile bracing your system with better cables (not knowing what you’re using) or looking into a good switch or other accessories which may make a greater impact for less or equal investment.

In my experience and with those of my clients, people find value in a dedicated streamer upgrade more often if their systems are truly able to render at very high fidelity. It’s not to say that your system doesn’t do that, but your virtual system doesn’t have enough information for anyone to weigh in properly on that. The last thing you want to do is invest $2500-5K on a streamer only to be disappointed in a marginal improvement.

I have the ps audio airlens. Best streamer that I have heard/owned. Using i2s to my ps audio DS sr dac using the revelation audio labs prophecy i2s cable.

Now that the HiFi Rose is in stock, I have ordered one and will let others know my impressions later. I might test out the fiber optic Ethernet to see how much it lowers noise.

I also disagree with ghdprentice and I also have over 40 years in the high tech sector. For over 2 decades I’ve used streaming software and there have only been 3 outstanding pieces that I would use today: Lightning DS, Audirvana, and Roon, these 3 are light years ahead of the others. The software with the best gui and functionality is Roon, followed by Lightning DS. The best sounding program is audirvana.

Where I disagree with ghdprentice is in the area of hiring a bunch of developers to 1st develop the software (not that easy or everybody would be doing it right and they are not) and then you have to keep a few developers forever for support and creating new functionality. Audirvana has done a good job being 1 guy doing the developing but the gui and functionality can’t compare to Roon.

Also, software is where you make your money. Write 1 set of programs and sell it to a million customers. I’ve been doing Oracle db work almost 40 years ago and Oracle is still around, grown in functionality, sold millions of copies, and it isn’t going anywhere, and yes, others have tried to be better, but to this day, nobody can compete with Oracle. Roon is like Oracle, top of the heap, has a strong company to support it, keeps growing in functionality, and its base keeps growing. I’d be more worried about the likes of aurender going out of business before Roon mainly because aurender is tied to only its machines where Roon can run on many platforms and this list keeps growing.

Oracle is a giant crap @rbstehno way worse than SQL Server or postgres. You'd know if you weren't stuck in your bubble.