Streamers rabbit hole

I also recommend the book by Robert Harley called the complete guide to the high-end Audio. It explains all the terminology, concepts and approaches

@rtilden sorry for not responding - I was attending a festival this weekend and listening to Shamekia Copland and Christone “Kingfish” Ingram slay the blues live.  I have the same Node N130 and Teddy Pardo combo that you have that I am using with a Furutech power cable and connected to a Chord Qutest DAC via a Chord Company coax cable.  I use it much more often to serve files from an SSD than for streaming at this point, and it all sounds very good to me.

But this is a four box front end I have pieced together over the last few years that takes up a whole 30” shelf on my equipment rack, and if I had to replace it all new it would cost almost five grand, not including the power or RCA cables.  The OP wanted a one box solution under $5k, so I just pointed out that there are a number of streamers with built in DACs that have been mentioned positively in this thread available new or open box under $5k.  I have not had a chance to evaluate any of these streamers compared with my set up.  Looks like you have gotten lots of responses, and it sounds like @ghdprentice has listened to and evaluated many of them and is a big fan of Aurender.

kn

Eversolo just released their T8 dedicated streamer transport today.