merge03

With the N10, I used the USB interface to a Berkeley DAC through the Berkley Alpha USB interface controller for a month or two. One listen to the AES interface and I never used USB again. In both scenarios it was with the same AES cable.

One funny thing is that laptops no longer have optical drives. Even in new full tower desktop systems, if you want an optical drive, you have to specifically add one to the build spec. My fancy new desktop does not have an optical drive, and its a high end gaming pc. Just food for thought.

I have an N10. I have never heard the disk drive make a sound. The N10 is about 12 feet from where I sit.

It seems that a lot of people are concerned about disk failure/corruption in their audio gear due to various types of power interruptions. I think these concerns are a little inflated. Losing power during disk writes "can sometimes" result in an unrecoverable disk. Linux fdisk, combined with modern caching drives, are a pretty robust system. But not 100% failure proof. Any system may exec fdisk if a prior power interruption is detected on startup. Whether it is needed or not. But in general, if the system wasn't writing to the disk during the power loss event, it's not an issue. From an ownership perspective, it's easier to just make the Aurender a simple copy of your master music library. And to also have a discrete backup of the master music library. That way if you ever lose the Aurender copy, just make a fresh copy of the master library. Linux rsync works great for this. A PC copy works too (just mount both the Aurender and the master library). Never treat the Aurender as the master copy of the library (very bad idea). Just skip the UPS entirely. A solid backup strategy trumps a UPS any day for data protection & disaster recovery. At work we found UPS technology to be unreliable and an environmental headache. When you really need a UPS, they frequently don't work as hoped. They aren't entirely without utility in a computer lab environment though, but good, large, flow through UPS systems are more of a headache than they are worth in a home environment. Any UPS requires careful management, regular testing and maintenance, if you really need to rely on it for guaranteed uptime.

Not to imply that the Rossini is simple.

Hi Vincent, Thanks for the reply. I had a friend asking about the Rossini, but I couldn't offer any comparative comments. I've only ever had the N10 and my Berkeley DAC series 2. I had always just assumed it was "better" than simpler solutions, but hearing is always the proving that matters.

Has anyone had a chance to compare the N10 (using internal storage) and their own DAC, with the dCS Rossini streaming from a NAS? Any impressions you are willing to share?

Please spend 20-30 years developing real time embedded systems, on razor thin margins, before imposing your own engineering requirements. The trade-offs between cost, complexity, functionality and actually meeting the original design requirements, may be tad more restrictive than imagined.

I'm quite happy with the Conductor App on my iPad. It serves its purpose of selecting an queuing music to listen to quite well. When I need to manage our storage and other IT tasks, I use the desktop machine. Personally, I would hate to see Aurender pollute the simplicity and reliability of the Conductor App. I also agree with prior comments that all that extra code should not be executed on an embedded RTOS.

Would you sort by actual release date (How many releases of Giant Steps are there?), or would you sort by original album release date. I think it get complicated fast.

I'm thinking about adding the Sonore converts to our network as well. Keep us posted on the SFP single-mode upgrade. Curious to know if that makes any difference.

The statement that "a computer is a computer is a computer" is an over generalization that ignores tomes of hardware and software engineering history.

Seems like the results would be highly dependent on the quality of the base filters and the DSP implementation. I would guess that applying such a filter to source material that had already been manipulated before release, might produce undesirable results.

The speed test may not show useful information. Streams will originate from a CDN somewhere in the world. At that location, or someplace in between, there could be congestion. Assuming of course that the content provider has deep enough packets to be able to contract out to a reliable CDN (almost certainly the case). If the problem is somewhat intermittent, I would think that. The stats I have seem are generally about three times normal traffic volume.

Spent some time last night comparing three tracks on Tidal and Qobuz with music that I own in CD and HiRez formats. I was very surprised by how far the Tidal tracks differed from what is on our hard drive. The Qobuz tracks were essentially indistinguishable from the purchased tracks on the hard drive (in both CD and HiRez). Since the source streamer is an Aurender N10, I expected them all to sound the same. The Aurender caches the data on a SSD prior to playback. The Tidal tracks seemed to be juiced, they were louder and seemed to be boosted in the low end. Maybe even a little congested. Since the player software and hardware involved in both cases is the same I wouldn't expect settings to come into play (or at least be the same for all three). I ended up spending more time trying to hear any differences between Hard Disk and Qobuz. Without spending more time at it, I didn't hear much of any difference between those two (Qobuz vs Hard disk). The three tracks used were Coltrane's "My Favorite Things" (Atlantic 50 years version), Ella Fitzgerald - The Lady is a Tramp (Rodgers & Hart Songbook version), Steely Dan "Hey Nineteen" from Gaucho. It's funny how Tidal was so different, in all cases and all resolutions (CD 44.1 included). I was careful to select the same version of the three album choices. That was 6 tracks total, CD/HiRez, CD/MQA, CD/HiRez (well 5 tracks in truth as Qobuz doesn't have a CD quality version of Gaucho, only two 24/96 versions 1983 and 1993). Of course I expected some weirdness with Tidal's MQA tracks. But the three MQA tracks were 48KHz, and I think that first unfold is in Aurender's software. Either way, the Tidal CD def tracks were so far off, and all in the same manner. All the Tidal tracks had the same sonic signature to them. The Berkeley DAC isn't MQA, so I had to really base the comparison on the CD quality tracks across all three and then compare Qobuz against my HiRez on disk. Where I found Qobuz to be almost (if not entirely) indistinguishable from hard disk playback. Hope others find this helpful. Aurender N-10, Berkeley DAC, Analog pre-amp, full Class A monoblock amps and Dunlavy speakers. The Front end uses regenerated AC from a PS Audio P-10, while the amps are each on their own home run.