Lumin U2 or Aurender N200


Looking for thoughts on these two streamers: Lumin U2 and Aurender N200.

I’m fully aware of the limitations and features from UI and Roon integration to design concepts and implementation (power supplies, caching, display, etc.)


Hoping to hear from those who had compared these two streamers. I’m also absolutely not interested in hearing from “it’s all 1s and 0s” crowd - this isn’t that forum and I kindly ask you to please stay out of this discussion.

Thanks and Happy Holidays to you all!!!

128x128audphile1

@fthompson251 Are you still happy with your Fidelium's, or are curious to try the Front Row speaker cables? 

@mclinnguy thank you! I’ll chime in with my updates after I try the FrontRow USB.

As to Roon…

From what I tried as far as UI/UX goes…Roon UI is the best there is. Conductor comes very close. Auralic Lightning DS is great too. Lumin is just not good.
I haven’t seen Squeeze.

As far as sound…Roon is good but Conductor sounds more open and musically engaging. I’m exaggerating slightly but Roon sounds dull in comparison. It’s just meh…

Same experience with Auralic where the LDS software sounded much better.
Lumin gave me no choice so I had to use Roon and it was closer in sound between native app and Roon but that’s not to say it sounded amazing. It was ok.

In the case of Aurender a large internal cache is being leveraged as part of Aurender Conductor processing. All of this processing is bypassed when you use roon. All of the proprietary processing in pretty much any streamer will be bypassed when used as a Roon endpoint. The difference will vary from I’m ok with it to f… it I’m ditching Roon

I believe that in order to get the best out of Roon you have to get a top notch all in one Roon Core streamer like the Grimm MU1 or Merging Tech. Everything else not designed with Roon as a primary objective will sound best with its own software and processing. It’s the degree of degradation that will vary. May be I’m completely off track here but that’s my take on it.

@mclinnguy  Yes, I have settled in on the Fidelium Speaker cables. They made my system sing when I first got them and just quit thinking about it. 

@audphile1  I certainly understand the cost being prohibitive, if I needed longer length i would have got the reg frontRow too. I also kinda made out with TMR as I had some credit to use.