Favorite Streamer/DAC combo under 3k?

@tubeguy76 

Yes I had the T8 for nearly 30 days and then returned it. I tested it in a lot of setups.

It is fine if you like the visuals and the pretty good sound but it looses a lot of micro-details in the music.

Lumin, Denafrips, Holo Audio all much better sounding streamers.

Generally Linux based streamers are better than Android based. Android is handicapped a bit in processing sound.

+1 for Eversolo.  The DMP A10 (new) may be above your price range but the DMP A8 at under $2K is a great performer.  There is an A10 for sale on Audiogon at $3,250.

I have an A8 in my 2nd system (feeding a fully upgraded Elekit TU-8600 into Harbeth P3ESRs) and it is an absolute pleasure to listen to.

I hooked up the A8 into my main system and the sound is very smooth and refined, perhaps losing the last bit of resolution compared with my Esoteric K-01 XDSE (at 12 x the price).

For a pure streamer/server, the T8 is excellent, though it appears that some DACs do not play as well as others.  The Esoteric, with its buffering and an external rubidium clock, pretty much isolates the DAC from any streamer and connection jitter issues.  So, a T8 and a good DAC would work well, and give you an upgrade path.

Both the T8 and DMP A8 support adding a pair of 4TB SSDs for downloads, and you can rip or listen to CDs by adding a cheap USB (< $50) disk drive.

Also, Eversolo have the widest range of streaming and internet radio sources, to the extent that setting which ones you can select from is a good idea!

With the T8 there is a CRITICAL step in setup - to turn OFF all Android processing of the bit stream - by turning ON the Eversolo Original Sampling Rate option.  Set up carefully the T8 does no processing of the data, but this is not the default, you must make sure that the DSP and Android processing are turned off.  Similarly the bit rate limiters must be turned off, and you should use USB or I2S.

@retiredaudioguy This!  Also disabling Wifi and Bluetooth radios also helps.  Gotta spend way more to beat the T8.  It has so many settings to satisfy most everyone's needs and if you think the screen is an adult toy and is distracting you can simply disable it so it's off too!  ;-)