DOBM

Following a demo of the Sennheiser HD800 headphones and my Meridian Prime headphone amp, I was suitably impressed to buy the Sennheiser's. Two weeks later and listening between 2-4 hours every evening, I have no regrets whatsoever. I use a variety of digital sources, FLACS, CD's, x2 sample rate, x 4 sample rate and also some DSD/DSF files converted on the fly to PCM by an Auralic Aries. I also use Tidal through the latter and must say I am very happy with all of it. I also had the privilege a few weeks ago listening to some MQA encoded material using a Meridian Prime which had been upgraded by Meridian with MQA decoding. The results were astonishing. I just wish Tidal would get a wiggle on and start streaming some MQA encoded content soon.

The Auaralic Aries was exactly the fit for me to use with a Meridian Prime headphone amplifier for use with digital sourced music. I have a couple of QNAP NAS drives on which I use 'Minimserv' as my choice of streamer software and I've also put a small 250GB SSD drive straight into the back of the Aries. My music files are mostly FLAC, with some very high rate DSS/DSF content as well and I use 'Tidal' as my streaming service of choice. I have an iPad Air 2, which is 4th generation device. It all works extremely well, except for the largest of the DSF files, where I suffer stuttering. If I copy this content to the local drive connected to the Aeries, the problem is completely resolved. For interest I have also tried AirPlay on the Aeries using an iPhone 6 Plus as a source and the results have been very pleasantly surprising. I've had no issues with album artwork and I'm utterly delighted with the solution. My suggestion if you are unwilling to run an RJ45 cable directly to where the Aries would be, would be to use a pair of fast IP over mains adapters. These have certainly proved capable of streaming HD Video and audio content from my NAS drives to a large TV in another room, plus all of the SmartTV's network features work well. The one downside, is that Auaralic at this point of time have not yet released their control software on other platforms other than the iPad. There is alternative software available, but to be honest Auralic's iPad offering and its Tidal and artwork integration were one of its major selling points to me. Finally there are two models of the Aeries, the 'LE' version is cheaper and comes with a wall-plug adapter as opposed to a considerably larger lower noise PSU and the LE version has one femto clock, whereas the more expensive version has two according to my dealer. You could therefore perhaps go for the LE version and put the extra money towards the latest iPad mini? Happy listening!