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

I have owned a dozen or two dozen streamer / DACs for my main, office, and headphone systems over the last twenty years. PCs and Macs are poor performing streamers. Purpose built streamers make a difference and the better they are (virtually always more expensive) the better they sound. I’ve had streamers (not counting many iterations of tweaked PCs and Macs) and they make a huge difference... like all audio gear... don’t listen to the hype about clocks or slick marketing. Read professional reviews, listen to them in systems and at dealers. What matters is how they sound and that is like night and day from bottom to top. 

I remember my anxiety when I bought my $22K Aurender... had I wasted my money? During the first cut I listened to I couldn’t believe what a great deal I got... it was more than worth it. As I verified over the next year this unit sounded as good or better than my great vinyl system... I could not tell the difference between a red book CD, a stored file and the vinyl (except by surface noise)... and that high resolution streamed files could sound better than what I owned. So... for years now all my other media has collected dust and I have been freed to enjoy music I never heard of before from my visually infinite Qobuz library. 

clocking quality is key as is noise management... different dacs work better or worse depending on their ideal connection/digital feed, so the master clock needs to be at the right place

it is all quite system and situation dependent, from reliability of internet feed, to power quality from the mains ac line, to local in-room/in-house power quality resulting from noise from other devices, to choices of hifi gear

all this said, i think the major rules to abide by are:

a. clearly know what dac you are wanting to feed the music stream to, and optimize around that specific dac input

b.  if it is a usb feed, then get the best clock at the dac (either within it, or on newer dacs, drive the dac’s external clock input with a quality external clock)

c. if it is a feed via aes ebu, spdif rca/bnc or i2s, then the clock signal is fed to the downstream dac from the streamer, thus the streamer should have the highest quality master clock

d. use linear power supplies wherever possible, not just for the quality of power supplied to the devices, but to minimize the spurious noise put into the shared ac line by smps’s

e. try to filter/cleanse the  ethernet feed well with passive (muon) or active (optical isolation, etherregen, hifi oriented switches etc etc) solutions ... note that most common ethernet use lowest common denominator switch mode power supplies

@ghdprentice  Thanks for your explanation about the clock — it’s the same thing I mentioned in my previous post about the master USB clock in a USB connection.
So, in my opinion, I already have a great DAC — a Lampizator Big 7 MK II with the Engine 11 upgrade. It used to be the top model from Lampizator some time ago (though now it seems like there’s a new one every month). I’m going to use a USB connection from the streamer. In that case, should I still pay through the nose for an expensive streamer, or I will not feel so much difference when choosing the cheaper one like Volumio?

Check out measurements section of hifi news reviews of streamers.  Noise / jitter performance of Rivo was comparable to $30k+ streamers they also tested.  That was using usb - vanishingly low.  I believe one of the upgrades to Rivo+ is clock.

The Rivo+ offers excellent sound quality as a streamer, but you’ll need to work around some software glitches — for example, the Qobuz playlist doesn’t appear when you try to add titles to it. However, the Volumio app sounds better than Qobuz Connect so I stick with it.