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 2 responses by willemj

I think dedicated streamers are an outdated concept that is about to go the way of the Dodo. You are locked into the apps that are available for the various services that you are interested in (as with so-called ’smart’ tv’s). I think they are the audio equivalent of the old dedicated word processors, before the advent of universal PC’s with packages like first Wordstar and then Wordperfect or Word.
In my view one is now better off with something more universal like a Chromecast Audio. No streaming service can afford to ignore its market prominence, and hence there is an app for everything. With Buble UPnP it can access a NAS. Since you can use a big screen tablet as a remote controll, navigating your library should be quite transparent, depending, of course, on your NAS software (about which I know nothing - I only stream from internet).
The inbuilt DAC is pretty decent for secundary systems (up to 24/96), but there is also an optical digital output for more ambitious applications. That digital output is bitperfect, so the final sound quality would depend on the DAC of your choice, from cheap and cheerful all the way up to something like a Benchmark DAC3, or, if you also require a disc player, something like an Oppo 205 with its optical input. The Chromecast also does multiroom.
From what I can see your GT40 only has a usb input so it will not work with the optical digital output of the Chromecast. You would need to use the analogue output of the Chromecast. Its built in DAC is not bad at all, so I guess the sound quality would be quite similar to the combination of the laptop’s usb output and the GT 40’s DAC. In the final analysis the sound quality of a streamer is in its DAC.
See here for the analogue perfomance of the Chromecast Audio: http://archimago.blogspot.nl/2016/02/measurements-google-chromecast-audio.html
I use it in a very revealing system and I have no complaints. Sonic differences between DACs are very small at best.