@bobheinatz I’m not going to weigh in on the combined vs separates question; you have well founded, well considered and well expressed viewpoints on that here already, but I will say that I suspect that you will not be satisfied with a BlueSound streamer. Over the past 18 months, I have been systematically removing BlueSound components (or components that have BlueSound streamers in them) from the various systems in my home; I will keep the Node-X that feeds a Sonance DSP-2 amp for the 4 ceiling speakers in my kitchen and a Powernode streaming/DAC amp that powers 2 additional ceiling speakers in a breakfast nook (as well as a Pulse 2i streaming speaker in the guest room), but in the principal listening rooms, I’ve gotten rid of both an NAD M10 v2 and NAD M33. I first tried an Innuos pulsemini, (big improvement) replaced that with a Innuos Stream1 (with the outboard Phoenix USB Reclocker) —another noticeable improvement in lowered sound floor and increased dynamics and musicality, now I’ve traded those in (with some other gear) and am waiting for an Aurender N20 to arrive. In my living room, I went right from BlueSound to an Innuos N200 and then about a year later was able to get a good deal on a used N20. The N200 to N20 improvement was not as dramatic as what I experienced going from BlueSound to the N200 (huge), but still noticeable, especially in terms of lowered noise floor. I doubt you would go wrong with a Stream3 or N200 (or N20 if you want the little bit extra SQ for a fair bit more $$), but as @ghdprentice notes, i would have saved a lot of money had i just gone directly to the N20s. (Now, I suspect @ghdprentice might say i am still aiming too low in the Aurender line up, but each system sounds great to me now and my rooms are effectively untreatable acoustically and so i think going up the ladder on my DAC/Streamer/Speaker set ups would likely not yield results at all commensurate with the additional cost.)
The one other thing I’ll note, if you aren’t that experienced in the streaming world, is that although Innuos and Aurender are pretty much equally comfortable playing with ROON - and indeed the Stream3 can act as a ROON core, whereas the N200 (and the N20) cannot — Innuos’s native streaming app (SENSE) is much more of a closed environment. You cannot, for example, use JPLAY with Innuos streamers. Aurender, on the other hand, is perfectly happy with JPLAY, which i really like using, and its native streaming app (Conductor) is also quite good and relatively easy to use. I tend to use JPLAY or ROON 99% of the time.)
And as a follow up to @audphile1 ‘s advice about not dismissing your existing DAC too quickly, if you haven’t read this recent thread https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/10-15-year-old-hi-end-dacs-are-still-great , you might find it helpful. And if/when you decide to go DAC (or combined DAC/Streamer) shopping, there are, as you probably already know, a lot of threads on here that are super helpful on that front. It is amazing how different very well engineered DACS sound from each other. (I’ve not found anyway to reliably tell in advance what technology or model I’m going to like without demoing the unit in my space. System synergy seems to trump pretty much any other category, e.g., R2R VS FPGA. )
