Upgrading from my Bluesound Node 2 streamer

emil

Thoughts on Aurender?
Looking at some used units ...

I bought an Aurender N100H in January as my first real streamer. It sounded great and looked slick, but that’s all I can say in favor of it. I just shipped it off just this week to The Music Room at a sharp loss, but it was worth it to get it out of my life.

Many people praise Aurender support, but I found the responses to my few issues were sluggish and disinterested. It was sometimes apparent that they didn’t even bother to read my inquiry - the suggested remedies were ones I’d told them I’d already tried.

The software that runs the streamer is frequently updated but always remained buggy - the company doesn’t seem much interested in improving it. When I asked about importing and exporting playlists, I got a pendantic response explaining how that would be nearly impossible to achieve. Oddly, Winamp was capable of this decades ago and JRiver and others have figured it out as well.

And heaven forbid you have a even a momentary loss of power - you’ll be in for a world of hurt trying to get the OS up again.

The reason I sold the Aurender to TMR was that I couldn’t sell it directly to a user in good conscience. It’s not that the unit was actually "defective" - it functioned as designed. But beneath its slick exterior resides a computer and software that is not ready for prime time, imo.

I replaced the Aurender with a Bryston BDP-3 and couldn’t be happier.

Thank you Joey and Cleeds

Joey
I hope you have better luck than Cleeds

Cleeds
Thanks for the warning.
Is this a known problem or is this just your personal experience?

I may give the Lumin a shot if I can find a dealer with a return policy








 

emil

Cleeds
Thanks for the warning.
Is this a known problem or is this just your personal experience?

The issue with the OS freezing after a power loss is a known problem. Some users employ a small UPS as a workaround. That's something I would have done if I was otherwise pleased with the N100H, but I wasn't. It's a second-rate product with second-rate support, imo.

I have had my Aurender for over two years and have not experienced anything like Cleeds describes. I lose power here all the time and the unit starts back up easily for me. Maybe I’m just lucky.

I have not heard the Bryston BDA-3.14 DAC/Streamer though my dealer, John Rutan, speaks highly of it. I don’t think he has gotten his demo yet. The list price is $4200. There is a very good review of the BDA-3.14 by TAS here:

http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/bryston-bda-314-dacpreampstreamer/?mc_cid=4750314291&mc...

Again, good luck.

@emil The latest Lumin Android app was released on October 12, if I remember correctly. Lumin has a dedicated Android developer working hard to quash a bunch of issues with the Android app because of the problems people were running into.

With respect to your question about Aurender, a lot of people really like the product and it works well, but their philosophy is slightly different. Lumin's approach is more of an open standards-based one, where you can use it with lots of different types of music library setups, backend music server software, and front-end UI software. With Aurender you need to use their software and their architecture is optimized for having the music files on the Aurender unit itself.

I would recommend at least trying the Lumin app (you can download it and use it, but not play anything, without buying any Lumin hardware). Aurender has some video tutorials for their app. If you don't like the Lumin app, you can use any other UPnP control app instead.