Looking for a streamer that will pair with Apple lossless, qobuz, and Amazon plus. Don’t really care about mqa tidal roon or Spotify.
Don’t really care about Dac performance but do care about UI.
It must have a I2S or AES output don’t want to mess with usb or coax out.
BlueSound Node would be nearly perfect but it doesn’t have the correct outputs. Any suggestions without having to step up to something like this:
Maybe try an Auralic Aries (non G1) model used. It should have AES on it and it is a reputable company.
You can probably find a used older model Aries for ~$700
Ran into this this morning.
Define what you mean by pairing. You mean that the interface to the streamer connect directly to Qobuz, Amazon etc? Qobuz and Tidal are generally well supported by streamers but don’t think Amazon has any native streaming support.
As long as you’ve got local conent, they’ll read just about anything via various protocols.
what about something like this?
Their page says primarily a roon end point but I don’t care about that. Would this work as a streamer for the services mentioned?
It has a I2S output and was designed to work with the Sonnett Morpheus which is pretty close to my dac.
I’d verify the i2s will actually work on your DAC if you can, there isn’t a single standard, which is why the Pi2AES guys dropped the i2s over RJ45 adapter. The manufacturers who used HDMI connections seemed to manage to agree on it to a point.
But it’s probably fine as long as you understand you are getting a Roon endpoint that can optionally run volumio, so it will only support the services they support.
what’s wrong with COAX or Optical? They don’t measure any better or worse than I2S and there are way more streamers with coax and optical outputs. If you desperatly need I2S, just get an AK4118 streamer board for a raspberry Pi and run whatever software you want.
It’s inferior on my Dac. I2S Amd AES are by gat the best for my use case.
If you can find a used Nativ Vita then that has AES. Used is usually sub $1k