Improving on the stream of a combined streamer dac

Sounds like your electrocompaint is a bad product....Are you outside the return window? If so, quietly sell it off and cut your losses.

I recently (foolishly) compared the streamed sound of my Electrocompanient

ECM 1 Mk II to internally stored digital downloads on the same ( ie not stored in my Small Green Computer server). I was surprised how much better the downloaded files sounded.  

Not sure why no one has mentioned this, but the culprit may be Roon.  Many have said that the same stream through Tidal connect vs Roon, the non Roon stream sounded better.  I haven't obtained Roon for this exact reason.  From what I understand, it has to do with how the file is encoded in Roon and how the streamer handles the encoding.  Not sure if anyone else has had that experience but that could certainly explain why you're getting sub par streaming compared to downloaded files

Thats a very real possibility.  I had access to Qobuz for a while and was using it outside of Roon and it was much better,

Will try Tidal Connect as well.

And to Deep_333's comment; The ECM sounds quite nice with downloads and via my CD transport.  The issue is w streaming. 

I must confess part of this thread came to pass due to a recent dose of vinyl bliss ( post tube rolling in my phono stage ).  That kind of raised the bar.

@audioman58 Which one do you recommend?

Not sure why no one has mentioned this, but the culprit may be Roon.  Many have said that the same stream through Tidal connect vs Roon, the non Roon stream sounded better
 

that may definitely be true in some cases. Roon performance level depends on a quality of roon core. Provided your streamer is high quality.
You can also downgrade the performance of Roon by using bad quality cables on both roon core and streamer.
There’s no network filter, switch, linear power supply or whatever other tweak you want to throw at it that can fix it if you didn’t get the basics right.