2. digital
  3. 180374-1433

Great customer service from Auralic Ltd.

I suddenly ran into a problem(s) about 10 days ago with my Auralic Aries G1 music server: contant buffering when trying to listen to music on Tidal; music library on hard drive abruptly empty (though the G1 still showed some 8000+ files present); the G1 unresponsive to the DS Lightning app on my iPhone.

It turns out all this was caused by two things going wrong at the same time: 1) Our Xfinity high speed router needed to be re-booted; 2) the 2TB Seagate hard drive with my ripped CD files on it was dying/had died.

Hind site is a wonderful thing but none of this was obvious late in the evening on Saturday 10/8. I submitted a service request to Auralic on Sunday expecting to have to ship the 6 month old unit in for service. I got an automated acknowledgment that same day and on Monday, 10/10, received the first of what would end up being 8 almost daily emails from Xuanqian Wang (Mr. Auralic) written in response to my observations following implementation of the various trouble-shooting steps he was suggesting.

Ultimately, and early on, his suggestion to re-boot the router restored access to Tidal. But it took a new hard drive, re-freshing cache and erasing the Library Index before a functional music library was re-established on the G1.

I greatly appreciated Mr. Wang’s patience, responsiveness and guidance in getting the G1 back in working order. I thought his efforts went above and beyond what might normally be expected by way of customer support. I’ve been very happy with the Aries G1 since purchasing. Based on this experience with Auralic’s customer service, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them to anyone looking for a piece of digital audio gear.

 

 

128x128ghosthouse
mgrif104
344 posts
 

I will echo the OPs experience. I have also had direct correspondence with the company president when posing questions about preferred settings in the streamer and my Sirius upsampling processor.  The company is very responsive to requests.

I will also note that my Auralic gear is stable.  Yes, the company does control software updates but it hasn’t caused instability.  I never had issues with my Aurender either - stable as a rock. I know others who post here where that was not their experience. So, my suspicion is that, for some, like many computer users, not all peripherals work as seamlessly as we’d like in all environments.

One final point - I upgraded from an Aurender N100H to the Aries G2 and it was a notable improvement in lowering the noise floor, in detail and spatial improvement. The Aurender sounded somewhat “flat” in comparison. I gather the new Aurender units are better.  In any case - user experiences differ so an audition is required and people should take recommendations in this forum (mine included) as just a data point. We all promote things we’ve purchased as validation.

Regardless, I’m a fan of their performance (particularly when you combine their gear via lightning link - massive improvement) and their customer service.

My $.03 (inflation)

jond's avatar
jond
5,794 posts
 

I've had no issues with my Aries Mini over almost 6 years of ownership that weren't network related. And @ghosthouse thanks for the vote of confidence on the Mini I certainly enjoy the sound I'm getting and proud of myself for taking you to the "dark side" 😎

pamelaburke
2 posts
 

I just want to say that I’ve used almost every AURALiC product made to date, yes this includes the very underrated and little known GEMINI 2000, and I’ve used them in every way imaginable. This includes numerous different combinations of NAS, Roon, internal storage, etc... AURALiC’s platform and products are so flexible that the options are endless. Reviewing the ARIES G2.1 I decided to use only a USB connected hard drive to store my music. The option is there, and I’m sure it’s a great one for many people without gigantic music collections, so I thought I’d give it a try. I tried both a large USB flash drive and my recently discovered Yottamaster HC1-C3 SSD drive with built-in cloning for backup. I initially copied my music to the USB drive while it was connected to my computer, then connected it to the ARIES G2.1. When new releases arrived I attempted to copy them to the USB drive while it was connected to the ARIES G2.1. Doing this I discovered a bug in the platform. This was reproduced by the AURALiC team and fixed in an update to the Lightning platform. One beautiful thing about controlling everything from hardware to software, is that support is much simpler for the manufacturer and the customer benefits greatly. Since the fix was applied, I’ve been copying new Three Blind Mice albums to the ARIES G2.1 over the network without any issues. Rebaid

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