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Auralic or arender?

Hi pc audio folks. I am looking to retire my old Lynx card output from a pc. Px keeps dying. It is clunky to interface with etc etc. I am looking at a couple of potential paths (neither of which I have local access to).
i will be feeding a 1st gen Berkeley dac so I have been focusing on players with aes/ebu  output.
the cost effective choose seems to be the auralic aeries. I could have my tidal and get my collection via nas or wifi. But is the sq any good? Once upon a time I used sonos and it was convenient but didn't sound that good imo.
the other choice is the aurender n10 which seems cool but is 8k.
i guess what I am asking is, is this one of those situations where you get what you pay for?
thx!
jimmy3993
erik_squires
16,037 posts
 
A self-made Linux server with a BAD USB converter? :-) Of course, that’s among the most expensive USB to SPDIF converters there is, there are cheaper good alternatives such as Wyred4Sound, iFi, etc.

You could make a mini PC with 2TB for $600 easily, and have iphone/Android support.

Oh, that's one of the things that kept me from Auralic. No Android support anymore. Not sure about Auralic.

I wrote up a blog on using LMS with Ubuntu, and Mytek, but the instructions would be 99% the same.

Best,

Erik
ahendler
416 posts
 
The Auralic aires sounds pretty good. I had some technical difficulties with mine but might have been a wifi issue. Replaced it with a MacBook Pro and stream Tidal, Classicsonline and use Jriver and it sounds better than the Auralic. Have not heard the Aurender
Alan
jimmy3993 OP
141 posts
 
Thx guys. If the aeries is only pretty good then I will keep looking.
i guess I could also consider adding the Berkeley usb converter. That would open up the Mac mini as an option.
mattmiller's avatar
mattmiller
1,497 posts
 
Without a doubt! Upgrading to a Aurender music player would be the awesome choice and its the best sounding, imo. (all their units are special in this way) Also, Aurender makes a lot of different products, some with DAC’s some without, some have huge internal storage built in, some have less. You may find that you dont need the $8,000 model. the $2500 one might work great as well.

Matt M
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