What will a streamer add?

[howardrodman]

Having gone through a few streamers myself, I would suggest that besides auditioning before buying (for sound qulaity) have a serious & careful look at the different control points/apps.

When I had my Linn Akurate DS digital player, I did not like the Kinsky app and on 2 occassions, when I tried to upgrade the firmware on the unit, it would fail and it took weeks to get it working again.

Then, I tried a friend's Moon MiND unit and did not like the Moon app.  My buddy also found it very unreliable.

Now, I have the Bryston BDP-2 digital player and the MPaD app has been working flawlessly on my iPad Mini.

If I were ever to upgrade, the Aurender X100L would be at the top of my list!  I'll be auditioning one this coming weekend for curiousity.

The Sony HAPZ1ES also has a very nice app (only tried it very briefly) but unfortunately, it does not offer digital outputs.

This is likely very old news by now, but the latest firmware update of the HAP-Z1ES lets you output a digital stream via the USB port.  I'm doing that now.