2. digital
  3. 167407-158347

Auralic Aries

Since getting my DAC I’ve been using Tidal via my laptop as my primary source, but the noise from the PC usb connection has gotten to be insufferable. So I’ve been looking at some dedicated streamers. The Aurender and Lumin gear seemed to be pretty much out of my budget, so I turned my eye to the Auralic Aries, Cambridge CXN, and Pro-ject Streambox. The onboard DAC and automatic upsampling on the Cambridge didn’t appeal to me, and I had I hard time seeing myself paying over $800 for Pro-ject’s suped up rPi, whereas I’ve read nothing but good things about Auralic. So today I won an auction for a pre-owned Aries with linear power supply for $695 including shipping. How’d I do? Seemed like a reasonable price to me...

Anyone know of any known issues to look out for on a pre-owned unit?

rfnoise

Showing 1 response by calvinandhobbes

calvinandhobbes
272 posts
 
FWIW, the Pro-ject Stream Box sounds quite good. I haven't listened to too many higher priced streamers, but I listened to a $7500 Naim NDX 2 as a streamer feeding my Pontus II DAC and without comparing head-to-head, I'm not sure I could confidently say whether the Pro-ject or the Naim is better sounding. I do like for a budget component that the decision was made to not include costly features such as a built-in DAC or LCD screen & that effort was focused on reducing sources of electrical noise. Some details about the design of the Pro-ject from the designer are in this thread:

https://www.avforums.com/threads/why-is-pro-ject-stream-box-ultra-s2-so-expensive-700euro-for-an-r-p...


More to discover