Streamers - Auralic, Aurender, Lumin, others...

Aurender N20 has been great. 

@retiredaudioguy thanks, I'm reading right now about Eversolo T8. It has nice price tag - much better than Aurender / Lumin. Similar to Volumio Rivo+. Are you saying that sound quality is better from Eversolo than from Aurender N100?

if you’re just talking streamer, no dac, and not doing dsp or some other processing, only differences among streamers are explained by noise, or its absence.  Remember, it’s just a transport, like a cd transport, so sole objective is accurate reading of digital stream. that’s why you don need to spend big $ or overthink it.  

Why do you need a streamer since you run roon on a mac? 
if you just need an end point, you don't need a streamer.

Couple of suggestions:

1) keep running roon and buy a great dac that has an ethernet input. Your dac will be a roon endpoint. Did this for years because usb sucks as a dac input.

2) get a dac that uses i2s (which is even better than the network input) and then get a streamer that its job is to convert the network input and exits to i2s for your dac. This is what i do for the last year.

Besides all this, if you are running roon on a mac running osx, switch the operating system on the mac to linux and roon will sound better. If you have a newer M series mac mini, pick up a used 2013-2019 trash can mac pro to run linux and run roon on this. This is exactly what i did a year ago. I still have a m2 mac mini as a server with 10TB of ssd/m.2 nvme storage, i have a permanent link from the trash can linux server to my m2 mac to the storage for all my tbs of ripped music. I have a 128g ssd on the trash can mac for the roon backups. Simple, i backup the roon storage from the m2 backup that runs daily. Everything runs very fast, roon arc runs fine.

The other option is to run qobuz connect which actually sounds better than roon with linux. 

I've used an Aurender N20 with a 10 Mhz clock for several years now and it's been flawless. I've just paired it with a ACS 100 which takes control of the library functions, leaving the N20 to create music.

Best I've heard under $20k.