Auralic Aries

[jjo]

My dealer is adamant that they won't do it, saying that at the Devialet dealer training day recently they spoke of all the limitations of the UPnP approach and how AIR was much better.....

I'm under this impression as well, after my brief interaction with the Devialet folk. Part of what they said was "DLNA / UPnP solutions are not optimized to transmit audio data. This is why there are latency issues and more generally playback quality issues related to it.".

Latency I get, but it shouldn't be that much of an issue in a home network, not to mention that other vendors seem to have solved those. Playback quality issues I do not get as it is packet data in the data network, so every bit gets through unmodified.

But that is their stand and I just have to deal with it. Possibly by buying a separate streamer. Even though, in the optimal situation I'd really like to skip the whole S/PDIF business and feed the bits through ethernet directly to Devialet.

For me Air has way worse usability than any UPnP solution.