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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
carlsbad's avatar
carlsbad
1,551 posts
 

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

cleeds
6,292 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
5,811 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.

 

 

dekay's avatar
dekay
5,868 posts
 

Can the Holo be repaired?

Thought they had a facility in the PNW.

 

DeKay

vonhelmholtz OP
911 posts
 

Can the Holo be repaired?

The unit failed within the first two hours of use.  I asked Tim Conners, US dealer, what to do.  He said that they just found out that sub-par parts were used in a few units and they would send a new DAC.

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