I’d like to restate that others have a very different experience with the Auralic Aries G2 series. My own experience (and in direct A/B comparison with other units from Aurender, Lumin and Simaudio) indicates that it does not have a high noise floor - but a low noise floor. Feel free to seek out the very thorough review by Hans B on YouTube as he’s far more impartial than most. If @ghdprentice experienced otherwise, I can only suspect something was wrong with his unit. It happens. Or, perhaps he/she had more noise coming into the Auralic than it was able to handle. That too I can easily imagine. Why?
I have the ENO Network filter and an upgraded network switch. When I inserted these into the system, the the noise floor dropped considerably - frankly I was shocked. Regardless, this indicated that any noise was upstream of the streaming transport - not within it. I get that part of the reason to go to a unit like this is to avoid needing tweaks. It doesn’t need the tweaks. But, it turns out that the best of units reveal the benefits of such efforts whereas lessor units do not.
Lastly, I actually compared the streaming transport function of the G2 against one very well respected unit costing close to $40k. Was it better? No. Was it a big difference? No - surprisingly minor as a matter of fact.
I mention all of this not to defend a brand I purchased but to remind people that experiences are both subjective and situational.
I have the ENO Network filter and an upgraded network switch. When I inserted these into the system, the the noise floor dropped considerably - frankly I was shocked. Regardless, this indicated that any noise was upstream of the streaming transport - not within it. I get that part of the reason to go to a unit like this is to avoid needing tweaks. It doesn’t need the tweaks. But, it turns out that the best of units reveal the benefits of such efforts whereas lessor units do not.
Lastly, I actually compared the streaming transport function of the G2 against one very well respected unit costing close to $40k. Was it better? No. Was it a big difference? No - surprisingly minor as a matter of fact.
I mention all of this not to defend a brand I purchased but to remind people that experiences are both subjective and situational.