Auralic Aries vs Aurender X100 vs Melco N1Z

[GuillaumeB]

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).

From my very limited experience of online streaming services, and admittedly only with Tidal so far, I am getting the distinct impression that there are some sound quality compromises.

So if we take my totaldac d1, I have a number of ways of listening to music, based on the firmware which I decide to flash on the micro-SD card:

- MPD only (with and without pre-loading) - using the MPAD or MPOD apps on iDevices
- UPnP using a standard UPnP control point (as Amabrok did with the Melco)
- Airplay
- Ipeng app on iPad (this is using the Logitech Media Server inside the totaldac)

Tidal is only supported inside the Ipeng8 app and it is a bugger to set up and get working. 

If I take a CD I know well, and compare between Tidal Ipeng and MPD only, the difference is huge... like a 6 and a 10 to use Amabrok's scoring system. I actually got it up to 7 using my iPad to stream via Airplay... but 7 v 10? I spent all this money on my system with all the silly tweaks etc to end up with 7? No way!

Now I'm not saying Tidal isn't a great thing... quite the opposite! I'm actually really keen to see if there is a way I could get the sound to improve by a point or two. So I'm going to try the Akurate DS and see what that can do first.

Anyway I'm digressing from Amabrok and EricDH's excellent piece of work but I wanted to make this point nonetheless. 

Guillaume