You don't need Roon to use the Lumin but if you don't use Roon, you'd be missing out on a key benefit of the Lumin. Unlike the Sony, Lumin supports Roon, streams Tidal and Qobuz directly if you don't use Roon, and accesses your music stored on a network drive or attached hard hard drive. Like the Sony, the Lumin is a one-box music streamer. Hence my search and hence the review of the Lumin D2. So missus can listen to her music on the Sonos in the office while I rock out to my headphone system in our living room and my kids groove to their music on their laptops in their room.Īll I needed for high end nirvana was a Roon capable endpoint, which is a fancy name for a music streamer and DAC. It lets you simultaneously stream different music files to all your roon compatible devices. One app, that brings together all of your stored music together with all of your music services including Tidal and now Qobuz, in one search interface. That includes over 40 DACs, streamers, receivers, Sonos, Apple Airplay capable devices etc. It can run on any computer (Linux, Apple, Android, Windows) and work with any hardware that is roon capable. Without going into too much detail on Roon, think of it like an operating system for music that is hardware agnostic. Then something fascinating happened in my journey - I discovered Roon. And most of these high end devices are supported by a proprietary app whose features and quality seemed to vary widely, from barely functional to not quite ready for the big leagues. I can justify the higher price of a premium DAC but $3-4k for streamer-only box box that doesnt do MQA and is not even Roon compatible makes me grumpy. For me, it’s network streamers without a DAC. They can skimp on a tube amp but spent a small fortune on rolling vintage tubes. They can spend thousands on an amp but balk at paying a few hundred for cables. At the other end were devices like Aurender, which seem to have the goods sonically, but which were priced very high and didn't support MQA or stored files or even have an integrated DAC (at least not at the price points I was looking at).Īudiophiles are odd cheapskates. At the low end were boxes like Sonos, Auralic Mini, and BlueSound, which supported many features but simply lacked the high end fidelity chops to be considered as seriously replacements to the wonderful sounding Sony or my now 14 year old DAC. High price doesn't always equate to more features, and my desire to find a "one size box that does all" and avoid a computer in my system proved to be challenging. Music streamers are all over the board in terms of features and price, as the market has exploded for these devices. I went looking for a music streamer, and quickly fell down the rabbit hole. The moment I tried Tidal (and later Qobuz) was the moment I realized that devices like the Sony would become high end bricks - very useful for the 300 or so albums I owned but useless for the modern age. This setup served me well until it became clear that Sony would not support high rez music streaming services - they could tolerate supporting Spotify but not a service like Tidal or Qobuz which might arguably compete with their hi rez downloads. I pivoted to the Sony HAPZ1ES, a one box music server that also opened up the world of hi rez files to me. This setup "served" me well until I tired of having a computer system in my listening room. I've enjoyed digital audio for quite some time, ditching my high end CD transport in 2005 for a Mac Mini based music server feeding a high end DAC, and later adding a highly modified Squeezebox SB3 with a custom linear power supply.
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