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I have the Freya + and very happy with it. Put it on your short list.

I have nothing to back it up, but when did that ever stop audio people? The more I read and ponder the more it makes sense. Plus I've never liked the idea of a computer on 24/7/365. Computers are made to do lots of things and built for a price point. Ditch the computer. SGC's Rendu line, Stack Audio Link 2, RPi, Lumin mini U1, Denafrips Gaia, etc. I think might have a place in your system over a computer. A proper tools for the task, no? If not why?

I was expecting a movie by Ron Howard. Truth be told, kind of tired. The Tom Sawyer one was great....this just more of the same.

Group hug. You are getting a Kinder and Gentler machine gun hand in your old age. Good on ya! I guess I'm still a d!ck.

Cuz you are weak, take it to the hoop!

Bueller, Bueller? Who is still feeding their DAC with their computer?

That's what she said

@Slovakmike1968 Buy one of these, you can pick them up used for around $200+/- https://www.crutchfield.com/p_859XLS1002/Crown-XLS-1002.html It has the ability to cross at different point. Give your La Scala bottoms one of the predefined settings around 300-400Hz and they will be sounding like they should.

I started off with a Turtle Beach Audiotron, then some home grown stuff. This had to be late 90s early 2000's. After lots of messing and fussing I settled on Squeezebox probably 2005-ish. I cared for and fed it for probably 8-10 years like you. Had a couple of them. I loved it but I was the only one that could effectively use it. They had a terrible quirk to the interface that after queuing up a great playlist you could easily wipe it out with one "play" vs add click. No warning. Always hated that "feature". Next came SONUS, still a fantastic easy to use one size fits all product.....be it a bit pricy given the good/great but not fantastic sound. Perfect for whole house audio, easy set up, no wires and just works out of the box. None of these solutions were quite HiFi in my book but super convenient. I had once ripped all my CDs to FLAC back in the 1X CD ROM days. Took forever. You know where this is heading. Computer failure all gone. Still I was hooked on all songs at my fingertips. So in 2011 or 2012 I sent all my CDs to a professional Ripping Service. A bit spendy given the bulk/weight/volume of shipping in both directions and actual cost. In the end worth it vs ripping them all again. Below is the current state of my digital library. Now safely backed up on multiple drives, once the size of a shoe box now a pack of cigarettes and 10x the size. Crazy. Like having/trying different versions of the same album. No problem. Simple these days. No folder browsing (was that Rolling Stones or THE Rolling Stone) not to mention which version is what. What flavor do you want??? Was hoping for a bit more discussion and questions. Hopefully others bring their experience to the table.

Sold, thanks Klipsch forums! Maybe a new record for me. Sorry Carl 😢 when I buy the Terminator + after selling all my LPs I'll give you first crack at it. I'm not big on things like jaw dropping or game changing or giant killer...but this is the first digital anything that has given me pause. Made me look up at the speakers and say, wow, cool.

I have a Denafrips Ares II that is like new. Less than two weeks old. I was so impressed that I bought a Venus II less than a week after the Ares arrived. All the original packing, the OEM power cord is not even taken out of the plastic. 3-year warranty that is transferrable, please check Denafrips site. If you believe the break-in hype this should actually be better than a new one as I’ve had it turned on playing music for 5 days straight and then on standby since. No worries about international shipping, Customs, Credit Card exchange rates. $700 (net to me PP FF) I'll pick up the shipping to your door in the lower 48. U.S. only. PM me with any questions.

Thanks, was hoping it might work as a Roon endpoint for the bedroom. I've got so many SONOS Ones around the house because they are just so darn convenient.....but I feel like I am cheating on my first love, Klipsch.

I don't see any specs for WiFi listed and does not look like it has a Network connection...is it bluetooth only?

If not obvious in the picture from the first post. You can have multiple sources of music. Anything after the DAC and before the "Speaker" could be your existing system. There could be a preamp with CDP, FM Tuner, Tape deck, Turn table, etc. Anything before the Modem/Router is the outside world of the Internet. This is where the term Streaming comes in. You "Stream" from Tidal/Qoboz. I actually don't. All my music is local to my house. I've got 44/16 Flac files, DSD/DSF, even a few .MP3s (GASP!!!). There are lots of ways to store/retrieve digital music. I know a lot of you totally get this. But I've had multiple forum members ask me how my Orchard Audio PecanPi "All in one Streamer" gets music to their system. So lets hear from all of you where this is old hat....or is that HAT (“Hardware attached on Top”)😉 Sigma Delta, R2R/R-2R/Ladder, Bit-perfect, NOS, OS, MQA. Once we get the infrastructure set up its time to argue about "best" DAC.

The Streamer connects to the DAC and cold be all in one device. You may have heard of a Mytek Brooklyn Bridge. It is a Brooklyn DAC and Streamer all in one audio looking chassis. The Streamer is really a computer with the specific purpose of delivering clean music to you DAC. PCs are said to be noisy because they are not designed for music….they are by their very nature a computer and built to do lots of things. Some deliver bits to a DAC via USB better than others. I personally don’t want a computer on 24/7 but that is just me. Another word for the streamer is a Bridge. I actually like bridge better because I think people new to this get "The Streamer" and the act of Streaming confused. In that picture above my “Roon-Ready Streamer” is a Raspberry Pi 4 (RPi 4), They cost $50 buck or so. You can get fancy cases and spend tons on a USB cable; but in reality they are almost throw away, in cost, compared to all the other things we do with audio. That is probably enough for you to digest for the time being. If you are interested in knowing more I can tell you how to take your computer totally out of the system and use either an expensive box that Roon sells called a Nucleus or a cheap Intel base “headless” computer called a NUC. A NUC (Next Unit of Computing) is a small powerful computer that can sit on your network in place of your PC. Headless means there is no need for a Monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc. The NUC can run Windows and do lots of stuff but for Roon, people tend to install a special version of Linux that is specifically designed for Roon…the software is called ROCK. I would not even consider this during the trial period. I’d go with Core on a computer and if you like Roon quickly move up to a Raspbery Pi if you decide you like the interface.