Anyone buy one yet? Thoughts?

Don’t be surprised if ARCE owners get stuck with only ‘connect” type services.   Streaming is ALL about DRM and licensing.   I believe anyone who buys one will be a Beta tester for a long time.  They dragged their feet with the dropout fix….  What do you think it will be like owning their streamer?  No thanks. 

If you click on “info” in the Aurender app you will see a tab called licenses.  When you click it you’ll see that there are literally hundreds of licenses to make these work properly and be compliant.  I seriously doubt Denafrips will do that properly.  I do not see them supporting this like a BlueOS or Aurender product 

My Dad just picked up an Eversolo A6 and while not perfect it is quite good and they have released a few firmware updates already. Still , who knows how long a product like that will receive continued support.    

My Vault 2i has been great , my Aurender is really a great machine.   Support is almost concierge level.  It’s that good.   They can remotely diagnose and do firmware and beta releases.   Their support is top notch, reallly important with a device that is essentially a computer.  I just don’t see the ARCE as something with that level of support.  And that can be frustrating when something is buggy. 
 

+1, @oddiofyl 

That’s been there focus from get go, make good sounding products and back it up with lifetime support to end users. I am one of the early adopters of Aurender’s and yet to find another brand that checks all the boxes when it comes to seamless integration with 3rd party DAC’s like Merging and MSB. 

At least the Grace streamer supports pandora, amazon, Iheart and numerous others. Yea, not ultra hi-res, but I don’t really care about that sort of thing. For 179 dollars, the thing works perfectly.

It has DLNA which would allow one to use the JPLAY app to stream Qobuz at full resolution and with a terrific interface … much better than M-Connect from a user experience and data standpoint.  That’s what I’m doing with my Ifi streamer and how would consider using the Denafrips streamer.

That said, if you don’t use Room, it’s a bit limited .

I would be more interested in the entry level Innuos streamer than this however for all the reasons mentioned.

JS

This is called the Banana approach to product development: deliver green and let mature with the client