Great customer service from Auralic Ltd.

Great to hear you had a great experience with Aurlic (Aries G2). I sure didn’t.

First, running the player is contingent on them approving you using it through the internet. For whatever reason mine was locked and would not function. My dealer contacted them and after a couple of days “unlocked it”. I spent thousands to own a player… yet they still hold the keys to allow it’s use. That was completely unacceptable.

Then, while it did sound much better than my Mac as a streamer… I still felt there was noise level too high. I swapped to an Aurender and the sound improved significantly… first a N100 then a W20SE.

Great to hear you are having better luck with Aurlic.

Not gonna be the last time ComCrap goes south.

Glad you got the support needed but none of this should have happened in the first place.
The Auralic OS should have handled something like this much more gracefully.

I had the ARIES G1 and the firmware bugs that caused issues every week, several times a week finally drove me to dump it. I replaced it with Lumin U1 Mini that sounded better, didn’t require login other than to Qobuz and Tidal, and had zero issues while in my system. Yes the Lightning DS is nicer than Lumin’s UI, but the LDS bugs render the unit useless way too frequently requiring the entire network infrastructure to be rebooted. No thanks…

I will echo the OPs experience. I have also had direct correspondence with the company president when posing questions about preferred settings in the streamer and my Sirius upsampling processor.  The company is very responsive to requests.

I will also note that my Auralic gear is stable.  Yes, the company does control software updates but it hasn’t caused instability.  I never had issues with my Aurender either - stable as a rock. I know others who post here where that was not their experience. So, my suspicion is that, for some, like many computer users, not all peripherals work as seamlessly as we’d like in all environments.

One final point - I upgraded from an Aurender N100H to the Aries G2 and it was a notable improvement in lowering the noise floor, in detail and spatial improvement. The Aurender sounded somewhat “flat” in comparison. I gather the new Aurender units are better.  In any case - user experiences differ so an audition is required and people should take recommendations in this forum (mine included) as just a data point. We all promote things we’ve purchased as validation.

Regardless, I’m a fan of their performance (particularly when you combine their gear via lightning link - massive improvement) and their customer service.

My $.03 (inflation)

I've had no issues with my Aries Mini over almost 6 years of ownership that weren't network related. And @ghosthouse thanks for the vote of confidence on the Mini I certainly enjoy the sound I'm getting and proud of myself for taking you to the "dark side" 😎