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AURALiC Aries price reduction

I have been considering ditching my "laptop as music server" setup I have been using for the past 7 years and purchasing the  AURALiC Aries music streamer.  Last week Audio Advisor dropped the price of the "full" version of this product to $1,279.99, a $319 savings.  Upscale Audio and HiFi Heaven have followed suit . Has anyone on this forum heard why the price drop?  Is AURALiC getting ready to release an update / upgrade / Aries II?  If so then I play the mind game of do I wait until the updated version is released, or purchase something at a reduced price that I was pretty close to sold on based on all the positive reviews.  

Any information would be appreciated.  Also, if you own one, what is your opinion?  If you upgraded from a Mac or PC to the Aries, was the sound upgrade worth the price of admission?  My biggest concern is if the Lightning DS will meet my needs.  I have invested a lot of time building my library and tags in Foobar 2000, which I will have jettison if I go with the Aries.  I am a TIdal HiFi subscriber, so I know the Aries will work well with that, and the Lightning DS interface would most likely be a step up from the Tidal interface..

Anyway, thank you for reading, and any constructive suggestions / opinions you have to offer.
exile_ken

Showing 4 responses by mikhaelkuz

mikhaelkuz
56 posts
 
I got used Aries recently. I do not know how much Aurender is better, but compared with OPPO-105 Aries streaming sound quality is way, way better and easy audible. I actually very surprised as I bought it for convenience and was shocked how much more smooth and detailed sound from Auralic Aries is. And especially imaging - image from proper hi-rez became 3-dimensional, like I only had before from the very best CDs or even better (I am using AES/EBU to my AYON CD-5). Apparently I was blaming HDtracks downloads for nothing )).


mikhaelkuz
56 posts
 
wharfy, from your perspective what is "price point proportional"? IMHO it is hard to justify (for me at least) price of a streamer to be the same as DAC/preamp.
Also comparing oranges to oranges - Auralic Aries femto used now runs 1000 or below, so there still a gap of ~1K. However I hope sound quality will justify the difference in price. Everyone I heard is very happy with Aurender, and apparently it is much less quirky then Aries. But Aries has coax and AES/EBU outputs, and some DACs do not have USB input (of sufficient quality at least) -so in those cases you will need an extra USB to SPDIF convertor, another piece in a puzzle, etc.
I tried to compare CD rip fed with Aries with CD played on the same player which is my DAC, and was not able to hear any difference. So it is hard to imagine how much better (for CD rips at least) Aurender can be. But I was wrong before, many times )).
mikhaelkuz
56 posts
 
exile_ken, yes now it is running Lightning server and LightningDS.
I have approximately 60,000 tracks from various sources (my different rips, tracks purchases, hdtracks downloads, etc) and library is very manageable. I did not measure, but it took less then an hour for sure to load and index it from my NAS (Synology 414 with 12G of drives). Integration with Tidal is pretty dicent (for example when I am search for track in my library search terms remains when I am click Tidal, which is very useful). Tidal sounds way better now then with OPPO app.
There are some quirks (not all album artwork shows up, I have to figure out why) and it is by no means a swiss-knife jriver (I have to try jriver+BubbleUpnp I used with OPPO) - but still not bad. I am running 5.1 beta, and having my CUE-based rips plays without pauses is great (OPPO could not).
I am running LightningDS on new ipad with 128G memory. As a convenience it worked I would say B- so far, but as playback quality concern - A+ (at least compared to my PC, OPPO or previous cheap streamers, which were even worse). Is it femto clock, is it AES/EBU vs coaх I do not know.

mikhaelkuz
56 posts
 
Exile_ken, given modest system I believe it will be hard to justify expense for an expensive streamer such as auralic or aurender.
Perhaps simple device as oppo 103 (or better 105), which is streamer/dac/player/preamp will serve you better. Jriver is $50 and will handle absolutely everything you throw into it, and many times more powerful then LightingDS. The only loss being playback without pause and lack of Tidal integration (you can still play Tidal on oppo). 
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