Aurender

Aurender is not NAS friendly, so I’ll look elsewhere. If there was that option, I’d highly consider Aurender. I’ve been thru that with these two Aurender salesman and got nowhere. In my opinion, a node with an external power supply and NAS is a hard to beat option for the money. With that, put your money into a great DAC and call it a day. If I felt the need to throw more cash at this I’d consider a Lumin. Just my humble opinion as one of the audiophile community!

Is finding your system,"completely satisfying", the real endpoint regardless of what others prefer? Makes sense to me.

Not to co-op my own thread, but many of you seem to be quite knowledgeable.  The I2s standard does not address implementation external to the board level.  Is the external I2s clock usually supplied by the output device, or by the DAC?

@dinov 

Aurender is not NAS friendly, so I’ll look elsewhere. If there was that option, I’d highly consider Aurender.

This is completely incorrect but downloading your files to the Aurender HDD or SSD will improve SQ.

I can't speak the the I2S issues raised by the OP, but with regard to the AES/EBU interface being limited to 192khz/24 bits, that is because that is the limit according to the AES/EBU specification.  Due to this limit, Dual AES was developed to support higher resolutions.  While you can of course bypass this limitation by using USB, some DACs seem to perform better with AES.  At least, that has been my experience, using an Aurender N20 with a dCS Bartok.

just like any aspect of the hifi system building game, people speak about their journey, their experience, their system -- with a certain baseline of expectations, skill, experience and budget

people find happiness and excellent sound at many various levels of expense and expertise... that happiness is found at modest levels of system building is a blessing for those who achieve this, while others may push push push, with ever more effort, learning and expense trying to achieve ever higher levels of sonic quality (as they perceive it) ... there is no right or wrong either way, we all enjoy the pursuit our own way, subject to our time, energy, wallet, and disposition

i think the key is no one should judge where anyone else is on the journey and how they achieve musical happiness, how they spend the money and effort and the sonic result achieved... if you are fully satisfied with a bluesound node with an added lps, power to you - but don’t tell others that if they have a grimm, an innuos zen or a roon core+optical rendu that theirs isn’t better (and vice versa) ... let’s just celebrate that everyone can find their ’happy place’