Enamel

Hi Badri, Thanks for clarifying. I sympathise with you about the software "quality" aspects, I'd rather have my DS app to be user friendlier (for instance, sort albums per artist and per year), stabler (no more crashes) and improved overall performance (when reconnecting to the Mini server). I currently rate the DS app 7 on 10 because it does what it needs to however there's plenty of room for further non-trivial improvements. I've been in touch recently with Auralic's CEO regarding a bug affecting phase inversion in the Mini's settings. Mr Wang is accessible for this sort of things, suggest you get in touch with them using the their support form on the website. I feel that they take their paying clients seriously. Cheers

Hi Badri, Seemingly reliable info about Auralic's Roon/MQA musings that may help ease some of the pain AURALiC add MQA, RoonReady to Aries at CES 2016 | DAR__KO Personally I am not aware Auralic promising or working on room correction capabilities. Cheers

I'd like to share my experience switching over to the Aries Mini. I used to be a Logitech "Squeezebox Classic" user starting as from 2006 and it served us well until its power supply let us down early 2016. I am a Mac user and my entire iTunes library (#14k songs) was stored in ALAC format on the iMac running the Logitech renderer which streamed music via wifi to the Touch. The main technical benefits of this setup were the ability to stream music without having to suffer the pains of using ethernet cables and the ability to backup the music library regularly using the Mac's built-in "Time Machine" backup system. Playing music required for the Mac to stay switched on at all times however we remained quite happy with the setup. I did some limited listening comparison between SONOS and the Bluesound Node2. I discounted the SONOS as I found the sound to be altered somehow. I did like the sound coming from the Node2, I found it to be more open and detailed. I was ready to go for the Node2. However, I read some positive articles about the Aries and decided I needed to have a go at it as well. I happened to be in France near Toulouse and I took the time to go to a hifi shop where it was possible to audition the system under proper conditions. I was blown away by the experience, the vendor showed me how this really affordable device proved itself worthy of playing music whilst being connected to audiophile equipment (for example coupled to Triangle and Reynaud speakers, I can not recall which integrated amplifier was used). I was convinced at once and bought a unit on the spot. Back at home, I got it connected in a breeze and made some technical adjustments to my setup. The music library is now located on a QNAP NAS (incl. local backup) that is connected via Ethernet to the Apple Airport Extreme wifi router. The Aries Mini fetches the audio files through high speed wifi ac. It never experienced any drops even though I got a wife and kids who are heavy consumers of internet and remote media. The IOS Lightning Server is a high performance workhorse, it reindexes the entire library over wifi in less than five minutes. The IOS client app is still at version 3.3 (Sep 2016) and that is another story. It used to work fine as long as the Mini's firmware was v3.0. Since the server's firmware upgrade to v4.0 I find that the client app crashes every so often. I am eagerly waiting for the new version to fix the stability issues (December 2016 ?). Also, having gotten used to the app, I miss some minor "usability" improvements like the ability to browse the entire library by artists alphabetically and view their respective albums sorted by year of release. For your information, my amplifier is an integrated from YBA (french made) and the loudspeakers are Spendor LS3/5a's getting support from a Spendor S-3 subwoofer. It's far from being the world's best, most accurate setup i but we enjoy it every single day, several hours per day. It works reliably and we tap our feet very happily, wife and kids included.