Auralic Aries vs Aurender X100 vs Melco N1Z

[amabrok]

Excellent work Amabrok. A very clear, no-nonsense evaluation!

It seems clear both from your evaluation and that of Guillaume, Rufus and others that dedicated and unfortunately fairly expensive streamers provide the best SQ for streaming ripped or downloaded music. Can't wait for a Totaldac v. Aurender shoot-out

Unfortunately, streaming from Qobuz now comprises the majority of my listening and of the three you reviewed only the Aries supports that service - apparently at lower SQ than my Mac which makes it a non-starter...

All I'm looking for is a high quality streamer that will stream Qobuz and/or Tidal now and which doesn't have an optical drive or internal HDD (for reliability reasons).

A TotalDac vs Aurender would be interesting indeed.

FYI, Aurender now has Tidal integration but still in beta and it does not work properly. I hope that in time it will be as reliable as the rest of the operation of the Conductor App.

I agree with you regarding optical drives and the possible impact on sound quality but looking on how Melco and Aurender implemented built-in storage makes me confident that it is possible to have built-in storage without comprise on SQ


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