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Auralic Aries

Since getting my DAC I’ve been using Tidal via my laptop as my primary source, but the noise from the PC usb connection has gotten to be insufferable. So I’ve been looking at some dedicated streamers. The Aurender and Lumin gear seemed to be pretty much out of my budget, so I turned my eye to the Auralic Aries, Cambridge CXN, and Pro-ject Streambox. The onboard DAC and automatic upsampling on the Cambridge didn’t appeal to me, and I had I hard time seeing myself paying over $800 for Pro-ject’s suped up rPi, whereas I’ve read nothing but good things about Auralic. So today I won an auction for a pre-owned Aries with linear power supply for $695 including shipping. How’d I do? Seemed like a reasonable price to me...

Anyone know of any known issues to look out for on a pre-owned unit?

rfnoise
jond's avatar
jond
5,742 posts
 
Congrats on your Aries! I've run an Aries Mini for 5 years now with no complaints. The only negative I've heard on the Aries is that some of them have needed their wireless cards replaced. The Auralic support forums are a great place to do some reading some very good folks there.

https://community.auralic.com/
mike_in_nc
1,137 posts
 
As @jond said, many of the original Aries had failures of their WiFi cards, an Intel model that Auralic's Xuanqian Wang colorfully called "a master of pain." If you use Ethernet, it won't matter. And maybe you'll win the roll of the dice and wind up with a good card.
rfnoise OP
153 posts
 
Thx @jond @mike_in_nc 
yes I believe I read about a guy replacing the stock (7260) card with the updated 8260 card. Why this card is better, or how one would go about effecting this upgrade is beyond me, however.
mike_in_nc
1,137 posts
 
If your seller isn't noting a problem, you may never have to do anything.
rfnoise OP
153 posts
 
@ghdprentice 
just out of curiosity, what prompted the move to the Aurender? That G2 looks a good bit of kit.
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