Auralic or arender?


Hi pc audio folks. I am looking to retire my old Lynx card output from a pc. Px keeps dying. It is clunky to interface with etc etc. I am looking at a couple of potential paths (neither of which I have local access to).
i will be feeding a 1st gen Berkeley dac so I have been focusing on players with aes/ebu  output.
the cost effective choose seems to be the auralic aeries. I could have my tidal and get my collection via nas or wifi. But is the sq any good? Once upon a time I used sonos and it was convenient but didn't sound that good imo.
the other choice is the aurender n10 which seems cool but is 8k.
i guess what I am asking is, is this one of those situations where you get what you pay for?
thx!
jimmy3993
Without a doubt! Upgrading to a Aurender music player would be the awesome choice and its the best sounding, imo. (all their units are special in this way) Also, Aurender makes a lot of different products, some with DAC’s some without, some have huge internal storage built in, some have less. You may find that you dont need the $8,000 model. the $2500 one might work great as well.

Matt M
Thx guys. If the aeries is only pretty good then I will keep looking.
i guess I could also consider adding the Berkeley usb converter. That would open up the Mac mini as an option.
The Auralic aires sounds pretty good. I had some technical difficulties with mine but might have been a wifi issue. Replaced it with a MacBook Pro and stream Tidal, Classicsonline and use Jriver and it sounds better than the Auralic. Have not heard the Aurender
Alan
A self-made Linux server with a BAD USB converter? :-) Of course, that’s among the most expensive USB to SPDIF converters there is, there are cheaper good alternatives such as Wyred4Sound, iFi, etc.

You could make a mini PC with 2TB for $600 easily, and have iphone/Android support.

Oh, that's one of the things that kept me from Auralic. No Android support anymore. Not sure about Auralic.

I wrote up a blog on using LMS with Ubuntu, and Mytek, but the instructions would be 99% the same.

Best,

Erik
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