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Aurender vs. Roon

I would greatly appreciiate any input on something I was told yesterday by a learned audiophile. A) that aurenders conductor app is inferior to roon. That is probably a given. However, I thought Roon will interact with the conductor app. so if that is the case then you can have the best of both worlds.  Also, Roon has better audio quality the Aurender? Aside from that, is the landscape moving toward Roon? Reason I ask is I have been looking at Aurender streamers to purchase and there seems to be more and more of them for sale on Audiogon and US Audio Mart etc. Is it possible Roon Ready devices are going to be the newest frontier so why bother with Aurender if they are not going to support it? Thanks in advance for any insight or suggestions.
mrdon

Showing 2 responses by auxinput

auxinput
2,920 posts
 
As far as his rant on "big processor is better because it's faster", for a music server, there really isn't a whole lot of CPU processing that is done, even on a custom implementation of JRiver, so the engineering choice of their specific CPU choice should be just fine.
auxinput
2,920 posts
 
determining the cost ($600-$700.00) of the innards and or production of unit.  It could very well be that the internal components of the Innous does not go above $500-600.  However, a HUGE part of the factor is the engineering and R&D to put all these together into a manufacturing process.  Add in the manufacturing of the case itself, which can be somewhat costly.  This cost is increased because these items are not massed produced like a cheap sony bluray player would be.  So, the company has to custom manufacture about a 100 at a time, maybe less.  You cannot send 50,000 units through an automated robot manufacturing process like Sony bluray players.  You're looking at 50-200 manufactured items at a time, probably hand built.

Additionally, there is a huge cost in the development and engineering of the software, which is not anything like a standard JRiver server.  This Innous product also has a custom internal network protocol that allows it to communicate directly to other Innous agent/players (the streaming port).  So we are looking at probably a minimum 2-3+ years of software development labor.  Part of this is wrapping the software into an automatic O/S, probably a thin version of Linux or similar.  This is NOT an out-of-the-box Windows installation.


So, this is a DLNA type music server.  It does require a "DLNA type renderer/player device or a USB DAC.  For pricing, it is comparable to other players, such as Bryston BDP-3 or any Aurender or Auralic type device.


In comparison, I think Bryston puts together about 20-30 devices at a time during their manufacturing process at their factory.
While OCD Guy does have some good ideas if somebody wants to create a "freeware" self-built self-engineered Windows/Linux server, it requires a level of computer/software/electronics skill and it is not going to be a "black box" with the specific features of the Innous.
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