Auralic Aries and Devialet 200

[GuillaumeB]

I had the opportunity to do a head to head comparision between the Aries and Moon Mind 180 this weekend with my 250.

IMO the Aries had the better SQ via AES and was even less "edgy" than the same tracks via AIR. (I guess I am one of the lucky few who has never had problems with the AIR solution.) Also the streaming quality via Qobuz was extremely good.

Honestly I was so impressed with the Aries that I am considering replacing my Moon 180 with one.

Those are very interesting observations albeit somewhat contradictory to my findings. I carried out fairly extensive comparisons last year when I had the Auralic Aries on home dem for a couple of weeks.

It was definitely more detailed than the MiND 180 (which I owned at the time) and initially more impressive however this seemed to come at the expense of some musicality and coherence. In the end I felt like there was something almost synthetic about its presentation and upon more extended critical listening (with a proverbial magnifying glass) I felt as though some of the detail was missing at the top and bottom ends, something which a couple of other people picked up on completely independently of me.

In addition I compared AES/EBU to USB (on the Aries) and found the USB output to be qualitatively better,, which surprised me at the time.

I would strongly recommend checking out the Melco N1A which costs about the same as the Aries and which is comparable in performance to my d1 server which of course costs 3 times more.

Guillaume