750$ Intel NUC vs $6000 Aurender N200: I don't hear the difference

Your experience is very curious to me and completely different from my experiences with Aurender servers, I still own a N100 and a W20SE. They have completely out classed all PC based servers and other similar stand alone streamers. I would work with your dealer on this. This plain should not be true.

What is your incoming power like? USB cable. There is something very wrong. While I probably would have gone with an N10… yours should best a NUC without breaking a sweat. PCs are very noisy environments… regardless of what else is running. I recommend some real problem solving to find root cause… something is not right, although it does not stand out to me.

@ghdprentice 

Agreed. Something is off, I can't figure out what. Am having another experienced audiophile friend come over this afternoon and perhaps we can sort it out.

My USB cable is Fidata: which is relatively unknown but a fabulous cable that beat Siltech and Audiomica cables in my system.

The Coaxial cable is Acoustic Revive.

TBH as an audiophile I am rooting for Aurender, not for saving bucks. I am looking forward to getting a server that will give me a massive upgrade in my digital rig. What audiophile wouldn't? Otherwise I have no place to go for a digital upgrade except some rabbit hole of ethernet cables and random network upgrades and ethernet regen and clocks and misc doodads. 

@essrand What I would suggest is eliminate the streaming first and judge each on their sonic merits alone. So record your favorite track, one that you have heard 100's of time onto a USB stick. It probably would help if it has acoustic guitar and voices. One of my references is "And You and I" by Yes.

If after comparing 20 or so times you can't hear a difference then there is no difference to be heard.

If you can then your router probably needs isolation or something else but do this first.

Good Luck.

been streaming (ripped music and/or Tidal) for a dozen years. When I moved from a Audirvana/Mac mini setup to a dedicated streamer/server, the Auralic Aries sounded better than the aurrender units and the DS Lightning software was also much better. At that point using USB to external dac. After a couple of years with the Auralic, got a very good dac with ethernet and went with Roon on a dedicated server using ethernet to dac. USB is a flawed interface and your better days use ethernet or i2s.