Music from laptop to living room

@mattmiller 

+1 

An Aurender will also automatically find you music on your NAS and can download it. You do not need a ethernet cable from your router. You can just place a small extender near the Aurender and plug into that. 

Hey @chichikov, it appears to me like your Sony streamer does not allow you to stream music files over the network, hosted on a separate hard drive. As far as I can tell, your Sony streamer only allows you to listen to music files you have stored on their internal hard drive, or from an external hard drive connected directly to the streamer. The Sony manual does state that you are able to copy files from a hard drive on the network onto your Sony hard drive using their HAP Music Transfer application. In my personal opinion, that seems very constrained in terms of streamer functionality. You can't do what you want to do with that streamer.

I stream over my network. My setup is a little bit more complicated, but there may be some things you can take away, depending on how much you're willing to tinker with hardware and software. I love the Jplay controller application. It's based on the UPnP standard. It's a lot like Roon. I actually replaced Roon with JPlay. I host my music on a hard drive on a computer in another another room. To make that hard drive available to the JPlay controller application, I have the MinimServer application always running on that computer. 

Most streamers these days support the UPnP standard, which makes my setup hardware-agnostic. I'd guess that like 98% of streamers are compatible with UPnP. That allows me swap in and out streamers, like if I want to hear out they sound different--and I continue to have the same great user experience. I don’t have to deal with Roon being buggy, or clunky Qobuz, or Tidal dropping a stream mid song. It just works. And somehow, it sounds better than Roon, too. Hope this helps. 

Thank you all so much! I couldn’t make a decision without your informed suggestions and that means a lot. I have some decision making to do because of the interesting options. So, I’m going to balance ease of use and cost and come away with something great. Thanks again!

I don't stream or play from hard drives.

IF I had 6tb of music, if I had 100 songs only, you need to see and choose from the content, search, ...

I would want a large screen, for a long vertical list, how do you handle that?

@elliottbnewcombjr I use a 13'' ipad as my controller. It was primarily for work, not picked specifically as a media device. I can see a lot of things without having to scroll, but it feels too big in the hand for me. I would pick an ipad mini or air if this were a dedicated media consumption device. My suggestion is to go to your local Best Buy and hold each in your hand to get a feel for them. 

@chichikov Some guys above suggest a used Aurender streamer. Some used Lumin U1 Mini's could also be a good used option around $700-900. My understanding is that the best budget options are from Wiim and Bluesound--for a good measure of user experience, protocol/app compatibility, sound quality, and price.