Aurender, wich one? Upgrading from a Mac mini

I just upgraded from a late model MacBook with Audirvana to a N100h and I’m very happy with this move. Sonically the differences are tangible and you can’t beat the convenience. I’m just streaming Tidal now until I can rip the hundreds of cd’s that I have. Haven’t tried the other streamers mentioned but I think you’ll like it.

When I auditioned a music server moving from a dedicated Mac mini with audirvana, I liked the Auralic Aries much better than the aurenders. The DS Lightning software is very good. I then used the Mac mini as a OS X server with 24TB of raid disk for my music and other things. IMO, you never want to have spinning disks in your audio room and SSD’s are way overkill for music. 
A year ago I got away from the Aries and went with the PS Audio directstream with the bridge with much better SQ. The bridge is a great alternative than a music server

I agree the Aurender N100H is an excellent "single box" choice to replace your MAC Mini.   The Aurender Conductor App is very easy to use.   The App has a tab to play your stored albums and another tab for Tidal Streaming.   In addition, there is a tab for Masters where approximately, 500 MQA Coded albums are available.  I strongly suggest you pay the $19.99 subscription cost for uncompressed must spamming.  Tidal is a highly recommended service.

The Aurender A10 is a similar unit but also contact a DAC.   This makes sense if you prefer a DAC that includes decoding MQA albums.   The Aurender N10 is expensive and I suggest you listen to all three models before making a final decision.  

Aurender Music Servers supports Qobuz already.  However, Aurender JUST disabled it for countries not in service USA).   You can use it once they support the USA.  The UI will be exactly same, and there will be slight different features which vary by service. According to The Belgian Radio-Television of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation (RTBF), Qobuz, the French streaming and download service provider, will be offering their three-tier streaming service for residents of the US come 2018.   "We are present in nine European countries, we will open, Italy, Spain, Poland (...) and our other border is the United States, we will be in the spring," said Denis Thébaud to AFP.”

mattmiller is correct above that the Aurender Music Servers MUST be connected to the Internet using an Ethernet cable.  The iPad needs to have access to Wi-Fil so that it can control the Aurender unit.   

 

Really you answered your own question already "2 TB’s is plenty". I will make it easy and say that GET the N100H its 2 TB internal storage and has no DAC so you just run a USB audio cable to your MAC, and control the thing with the AWESOME Conductor app for tablets. As far as sound goes ALL the Aurenders sound completely gorgeous! You will be happy :-) But you have to plug the Aurender in using the Ethernet cable to router if you want to stream effectively and use NAS or a PC for extra storage. For $2700 nothing can touch it when you factor in the Conductor app its a #1 pick!

Matt M