I use a shield plugged into my dacMagic to my McIntosh amp. USB audio player pro and tidal and my personal library on Plex all figure out the proper decode flags per track and it works just fine. A network streamer just looks cool imo but functionality wise I would only ever want to use one of I didn’t also have my tv in my listening room

My McIntosh 2520 has tone controls, I never use em but they are there