Aurender Conductor app reliability and user experience

You will find that many people are pleased with Aurender, the Conductor app, and support, especially from "Ari," the one guy they seem to have in the US.

I bought an Aurender (new) from my local dealer and was never pleased with it. The device was unpredictably buggy. I’d contact support, and the useless email responses more than once indicated they hadn’t thoroughly read my email’s description of the problem.

Ari finally told me the Aurender maybe had a problem with the way my digital files were stored. That seemed odd to me, because no other hardware or software had ever had any issues with them. Perhaps the issue was that Aurender seems Apple-centric and I’m a Windows and Linux guy. No matter, I dumped the Aurender after a few months of frustration, bought a Bryston BDP-3 to replace it and have been happy as a clam ever since.

I have an excellent relationship with my dealer and could have gotten him involved for a refund. But at that stage, I didn’t want to be in a position where Aurender could claim it did me any favors. Good riddance.

+1 lordmelton All points

I prefer Roon for a bit of functionality, but like Conductor and love Aurender.  I’m using a newer iPad.

Thanks for all your responses and suggestions. I will give it a try for a couple of weeks and see how much I like the app.

@lordmelton i agree, the best will be to separate the renderer from the DAC. My main problem is the price, I’m not willing to have a digital component that worth the same than my amp+speakers.

Right now I’m using a bluesound Nose 2i as a streamer and a Topping dx7 pro as DAC. The sound quality is good enough but it doesn’t compare to the Berkeley alpha series 1 I used for a couple of months and it’s inferior than the Aurender A200.

@robertkpax 

The sound quality is good enough

If “good enough” is your goal then saving money is a reasonable strategy.

As a long term user of Aurender and the Conductor App with only a few problems, I would recommend that you look at Auralic instead. The Conductor app is OK but compared to the Auralic Lightning app or even BluOS it has a long way to go. And in the 4 years that I've used it I have seen no major updates or improvements. I am ready to move on myself.