coldowoldo

I think you are right, it does void the warranty. The dealer installed one wasn't too expensive though, and i don't think it takes them long. Im surprised to hear your a little disappointed with the low end, its one area where i feel my system has vastly improved, the decay of notes is fabulous and the timing excellent? Perhaps it just sings with my system or cables etc. Id recommend you maybe play around with the cables to get the most tuneful base. I certainly find my JPS Labs / Vertex AQ cabling helped a great deal. Are you using the balanced outputs or the single ended?, certainly when i tried the single ended, it obviously sounded quieter but it also seemed to lack the taughtness (is that a word? :-)) and the sparkle of the balanced outputs for some reason. Wee pic of the device in the rack....

Im not focussing on the app and instead concentrating and the device, as i think this was the point of this thread! I happen to find the Lightning DS app excellent and far more intuitive than Apple Music app. Its perfect integration into Tidal makes it an excellent platform for me. Having considered the Aries / Vega for quite some time and having heard the combo a couple of times, when the Altair came along i was very interested indeed. Having enjoyed the sound of the Aries / Vega combo i thought id order the Altair instead having discussed with the dealer it's comparison to the former and his very well trained ears noticing no distinguishable difference. Auralic specify that there is a hike in sound quality but as its a very high end piece of kit for the money, the realities of the perceivable differences would, i suspect be very difficult to hear. Having Slotted it into my set-up Ayre KX-5emp / V5xe / L5xe / Proac Future 2 / Shanling CTD100C / JPS Labs & Vertex AQ cabling i found set up a little fiddly, mostly i think down to the age of my router at home. Id opted for the dealer installed SSD disks so that i had decent onboard storage. With the ageing DAC in the Shanling i had the added bonus of hooking it up to those Femto Clocks and a bang up to date DAC. The hard drive comes with quite a bit of sample material including many DSD64 files (Its capable of up to DSD 256) and from the minute the track kicked in i knew it was very special indeed. Stunning Detail, Rich open soundstage, taught bass and incredible timing. It's been a long while since a piece of hi-fi equipment has had the hairs standing on the back of my neck but even a lowly M4A rendition of Miles Davis - Kind of blue had me wondering where all the additional instrumentation had come from. An interesting tell tale sign for me was the fact i have a Proac Response sub that id bought on a whim and installed alonside the big Future 2's to almost immediately remove it again as it sounded muddy and confused the excellent timing of the Proacs, but to my surprise the Altair has sorted this right out revealing higher resolution and bandwidth either side of the audio spectrum. Put simply, it reveals every musicians instrument in a cohesive way. It's voiced slightly on the warm / detailed side, which i love but playing around with the filters would most likely reveal one for all tastes. Hard disk just popps up as a network drive when i boot up my mac and i can just throw tracks on it. An occasional rescan doesn't bother me and it rescans automagically when it boots up anyway. In summary and for the price, this is an absolutely amazing device. Ive recently heard similar offerings from Lumin, Linn & Naim and I personally didnt think they came close. Build quality is stunning and the interior is beautifully thought out with short signal paths where possible. Buy with absolute confidence.