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There a lot of ways of skinning this cat. Don't waste money on stand alone DACs unless you have a defined purpose like audio recording, mixing and editing. The DAC in you AVP or AVR will be fine. Unfortunately most two channel gear can be limiting because of lack of bass management or other facilities. This tends to drive the market to multichannel units, which is a pity and in my view needs to change.
Most people use streamers and smart TV apps. I don't. One reason is I don't think they are handy, they are also restrictive, especially if you are orientated to classical music.
So I use computers and one App on my TV, for the BPO that has Atmos streams not available via Windows.
In the AV room I have DAW for audio streaming, recording and editing. For AV streams I watch, I have an HTPC I built round a gaming board.
Now at the request of my wife, I built a system for our Great Room. My wife loves this system. And honestly of the three systems this is the one that garners the most interest from visitors, who would just love to have something similar. This is especially true of soundbar owners! I think there are lessons for the AV industry here, and the building industry, come to that.
The computer is a small NUC, five years old and replaced two days ago, to update to Windows 12. More about this in below.
The NUC is the little silver unit, bottom shelf left.
Two days ago we replaced it with this.
On opening it up I could not believe the superb quality of the unit and it already had Windows 12 loaded.
It controls from the same radio keyboard as the last one. It worked first time, and after set up worked just like the previous one. My wife has had zero issues using the new unit right away.
I think a unit like that is a much better way to get high quality streaming, and you can grab any high quality streams out there. Many are unknown and unavailable to those using streamers.
