What makes One Music Server Sound Better than Another?

I will try to weigh in with my 2 cents worth on this subject, FWIW.  I owned what I considered a very good streamer with a suggested list price of around 6000.00, the only problem was the fact that I hated the app used to control it.  I finally got to the point where I just couldn’t deal with the app any longer, so I emailed Joel at Upscale Audio to get his opinion on the difference in my server vs the Aurender N20, especially since it gets a lot of praise on this forum.  He unequivocally told me the N20 was in a different league altogether.  I really didn’t want to spend the money at the time for the upgrade but decided to go for it anyway.  What the heck, it’s only money right?

When I got the N20 installed in my system I did a direct comparison between my original server vs the N20 by playing the same music and switching between the 2 inputs on my DAC.  I have them both hooked up with Audioquest Carbon AES/EBU XLR cables to my PS Audio MK2 DAC.  I was disappointed on my first listen because I didn’t really hear a big enough difference to have spent that much money on the upgrade.  At that point I just turned everything off and thought now what, do I send the N20 back and just keep what I had or what.  I decided to listen to the Aurender for a couple of weeks just to see how it played out, and to also play with their app to find out how easy it worked, what a difference an app makes as far as an interface goes, even though it isn’t perfect, it is still a far better experience than what I was used to.

After a couple weeks of listening to the N20 I decided to compare it to my original server again.  This time I was totally blown away by the difference in the sound, every time I listened to the original server it sounded like I put up a screen or something between me and the music, the soundstage seemed to collapse, and the music lost a lot of what I would describe as musicality.  I think I made the right decision by keeping the N20.  I know there are probably better servers out there, but I can’t imagine getting better sound from my system than the N20 gives me without spending a lot more money, I also understand now why the N20 garners a lot of praise from the folks that own one.  I should also add that their tech support is first class, with a response time that is very impressive.

@vandy357 that’s about how long the Aurender needs to break in. My N200 settled after couple of weeks. 

In another thread on another forum, I was berated for not knowing that Roon changes the sound on all servers. I asked if it was because of its DSP feature and was told no and that I was an idiot. He said that the basic software in Roon changes the sound. Is any of this true? Roon by itself changes the sound of every server from the Node to the N30?

@audphile1

It certainly did on this one, it just absolutely blew my mind that there was that much difference in the sound after a couple weeks.  I have always been a believer in break in time but have never experienced that big of a difference in a piece of equipment.

@curiousjim it’s an interesting question. I wouldn’t say it changes the sound on all servers. I just don’t know if it does. I owned Lumin U1 Mini and Auralic Aries G1. 

I will say though, that on Auralic, I preferred the sound quality of its native Lightning DS app. On Lumin, I preferred Roon. I believe it is due to signal processing taking a different path. In example of Auralic and using Lightning DS, the stream is cached, and that might potentially reduce the noise and result in cleaner processing. With Lumin, Roon sounded just a slight bit smoother than the Lumin native app, which is very user unfriendly by the way. In both cases, I had Roon DSP disabled.