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Aurender

I have a Korean car, watch KDramas and even listen to some KPop, but I don’t get what Aurender is doing.

I’m currently in digital hold given that my new Holo DAC died, but intend on listening to my IFi Zen stream and look at upgrade paths.

Some of the most respected members of this forum swear by Aurender, so it must deliver, but here is my point of confusion:

1. Coax and AES are the preferred outputs, but higher bandwidths require dual AES out, but I don’t have dual in on my DAC.

2. Aurender’s top models claim to have great clocks, so why not pass this on to the DAC via I2s?

3. Top Aurenders accept external clocks and I assume this is used with a DAC that accepts external clocks, but why bother when I2s would take care of this?

4. The argument against I2s is that there isn’t a standard, but this isn’t a problem in most implementations.

I’m sure that I have misrepresented things above, so please correct my understanding.

vonhelmholtz
lordmelton's avatar
lordmelton
1,070 posts
 

Most of your questions are about I2s, well after exploring I2s extensively it's not such a big deal. USB is more than capable of providing exceptional musical reproduction and IMO betters SPDIF, depending on your DAC, of course.

I cannot recommend the N20 highly enough and Aurender doesn't use Roon because it has it's own Conductor App which is exceptional and doesn't have problems, although the Android version was upgraded a couple of weeks ago and we experienced some temporary glitches.

Aurender owners are generally extremely happy with their purchase except for the few clowns who post trash.

 

vonhelmholtz OP
911 posts
 

I wasn’t aware of varying I2s standards, only differing I2s pinouts.

With AES DSD must be trancoded to PCM and John Atkinson noted that with the N10 the highest bandwidth was "24-bit PCM stream sampled at 176.4kHz". 

For those that buy higher bandwidth music files and aren't able to use twin AES, are you using USB with your Aurender?

carlsbad's avatar
carlsbad
1,551 posts
 

Aurender is not roon ready because they see roon as a competitor to their Conductor ap.

cleeds
6,324 posts
 

I’m among those who weren’t happy with Aurender, which I "upgraded" to from a Raspberry Pi with Digi+ hat. Mine was never really reliable or stable long term, and e-mails from their one tech in support ("Ari") sometimes showed he hadn’t read what the problem was or what remedies had been tried. I finally dumped it (at TMR) and have been happy with a Bryston BDP-3 ever since.

I’ll give Aurender this: Mine sounded great when it worked.

lalitk's avatar
lalitk
5,847 posts
 

@vonhelmholtz

That is correct. Not only we have varying I2S standards, there is no consistency between I2s connectors among manufacturers of DAC / Streamers. 

The software/DSP-level DSD-to-PCM conversion was aimed to accommodate compatibility with DACs that do not support DSD decoding on SPDIF or AES/EBU inputs. Typically, software/DSP-level DSD-to-PCM conversion almost always sounds terrible. That’s why Aurender’s transports like N10, N20 SPDIF / AES outputs allows an extremely high quality DSD-to-PCM conversion engine performed by FPGA using thousands of tap filters.

If you don’t prefer DSD to PCM conversion, then please use USB output on any of the Aurender streamers for high resolution files beyond 24bit/192kHz. BTW, N10 is now officially discontinued. You can still find good bargains on used N10’s but the newer N series is much improved over its predecessors.

 

 

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