Auralic Aries

[Antoine]

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The problem is, they have selected their path with streaming and they may not want to back down or give in to more standard methods of streaming. They claim their way is superior and they want to stick with that. Which is fine, in a way.

It's just too bad that they have selected the you should listen to music with a laptop on your lap/you should run back and fort between a computer and your hifi to select the music you want to play/you can only stream form Windows or Mac/why not distract yourself with a computer while listening -way that I'm not personally a huge fan of.

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Well I am perfectly happy with my dedicated PC based solution running JRiver. Together with my iPad running JRemote I have everything I need. Once setup it's set and forget, absolutely no need to "run back and fort between a computer and HiFi".

So in my case no need for UPnP or an external streamer, it would be an over redundant piece in the chain. Your Devialet can already be the bridge between the computer/network "world" and the HiFi world and you even have a choice in using the input you like most: USB + ethernet (and even the usually lesser quality digital or analog outputs of a PC).

Of course some people already owned a NAS before they bought the Devialet (well sell the NAS and buy back a small, simple, silent, cheap PC and use that as a 24/7 up-and-running NAS) or may be scared of the PC based solution (get over it, there's lots of how-to's, guides and even specialists who sell these as complete solutions!! ) I feel this is where we're all going: computer based playback. Using a PC you'll have maximum flexibility, it's future proof, you can use stable software that's been around for years and don't have to depend on extra manufacturers (beside Devialet of course) like Auralic that start at near zero to create a working (software) solution.

uPNP has serious disadvantages and if manufacturers do a good job they'll hide that fact from you but I agree with Devialet in that in a way they've chosen a superior solution as it is completely application agnostic and ties in to the driver layer of the operating system as a virtual soundcard. There is a downside though and that's the closed/proprietary nature of their solution and also the limited cross platform support. And Devialet also had to start from near zero for which we, their customers, have paid the price as well as it took Devialet and us quite some time to create a stable solution. Now that it is (some say, almost ) there we can reap the benefits and use every and any PC based application we'd like to produce music and sound.