Lalik it is lovely that you are an Aurender owner and fan, if you notice in our posts we never said the Aurender units weren’t good or they did not perform, what we did say is that many people are choosing Roon for a number of reasons.
The Conductor is one of the best music control apps, out there, it is very very good, and does offer a bit of the meta data quality that Roon offers.
You may be missing one of the greatest points with Roon you can have a house full of music and Roon can control many other devices such as Sonos, or NAD Blue Sound or Naim or other Chromecast or Airplay enabled devices.
Other people love the complete libray integration of both storred and streaming music.
Other people love the file handling and eq functions that the DSP tab provides.
Other people love the experiential quality of the Roon meta data.
Companies such as Aurender are going to be challenged by more Roon enabled servers because Roon is gaining more and more market share and they always keep on improving the software.
Also on this thread it seems you bash upconverting. There are many many dacs that will sound better with upconverted digital or transcoded at least with Roon you can have your choice of playing a file Native, as upsampled PCM or playing Tidal as all DSD files.
The choice of how you want your music files relies on the user and what sounds best on the dac.
Companies such as Innous are pushing the bar in sound quality and for a small upstart company they are gaining a large share of the server market.
Why? Because they build an excellent sounding, very well designed, and very reliable server, and in each price catagory seems to be the best sounding product.
How many companies do you know that build servers with ethernet noise filters in them for both input and output to best feed an ethernet enabled dac?
We have done those tests Tidal played direct by a streaming dac and then the Innous feeding the same dac via its filtered and packeted ethernet port the sound quality was was better via the Innous Zenith then by beeing feed direct.
Unfortunatly Innous was stung by the recent Intel chip shortage but it does seem that Innous have located a supplier of this chips that has sufficient quantity to enable the production of the Zen and Zenith models and Intel is supposed to be getting the pipeline going again.
This was an Intel screw up in not forcasting demand not Innous and many companies that made products using a certain class of Intel CPU’s were affected.
Companies like Innous push the industry to rise to new heights personally all of these server companies should make one of two versions with the choice of what OS you want to run wouldn’t that be lovely?
Recent review of the Innous Statement:
http://www.hifiplus.com/articles/innuos-statement-music-server/ If you read my review of the
Innuos Zenith SE you will know that I considered that server to be a game changer, a product that redefined what was possible with digital audio
The Innuos Statement takes what the company did with the SE and goes considerably further in the quest to unearth maximum musical brilliance in any recording.
I suspect that the more I use it the more I’ll hear, especially if paired with better conversion, amplification, and transduction.
I am confident in saying that it has few – if any – peers in the network server field, which means that it is one of if not the best digital source you can buy today.
Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ Innous dealers
