Aurender N100 v AIR

[Hifi_swlon]

Are your Facts a tad bright at times with the Devialet. I have the 23s and love them but thats my one concern. FACT 8 or 26s was my next aim until Devialet did not do what it advertised  

I'm not sure I can fully blame PMC as my room is about as far from ideal as you could hope for, and I'm using a Mac as a source which many say isn't quite up to it - the Facts aren't very forgiving. They sounded a lot better when I demod them. And I could never get my Neats sounding as they used to when I moved to this house - driven with Naim or Teddy Pardo.

The treble energy is just too much to my ears. In fact, I've developed slight tinnitus this last year and I'm sure it's down to them and all the listening at different levels to find a sweet spot which I never achieve. I just need more bass and a fuller sound and less fatiguing treble - I do hear the Facts are generally thought of as mid-forward (which I didn't appreciate when buying them). But then some people love them so it could be anything. If the next source enhancement or replacement doesn't fix it they're out though!

As an aside I've been using headphones at work - an 8 year old pair of bottom of the range Grado's straight out of my Macs headphone socket, and to be honest I prefer the sound. Apart from the bottom end the detail all still seems to be there, but with none of the aggressive treble. Ho hum.

One ray of light on the streamer front if you use Roon, there have been a few snippets this past week of actual working 'roonspeakers' (RAAT now) on a Raspberry Pi2. This is what I'm now holding out for before buying something more expensive. I previously tried an RPi2 but with squeezeplug and it was a total faff and only for those that want to mess around with tech. I never got rid of crackles (different to Air, equally annoying), but between them the sound was really good. Better than my Mac from memory. I have no doubt any Roon implementation will be good and easy to setup. They are so cheap (£35!) that with a decent linear supply are probably ideal for a streaming 'endpoint' where really all you want is decent software on a very minimal computer with very little else going on inside.

Perhaps it won't rival the dedicated hardware of Aurender, but if Roon get it work I think they'll really rock the boat in the streaming world since few could compete cost-wise. Of course you'd need still need to buy Roon and have another server so the total cost adds up, but.....