Aurender N20 or A15


After many loops through the Aurender product selector, and paying attention to what I am willing to spend, I have landed at a likely choice between the N20 or A15.  For any who've had the chance to listen to these two critically with the same external DAC, can you ascribe any difference in sound quality?  

While I can certainly see that the N20 is a more flexible component in terms of digital connectivity, and has some additional hardware refinement, maybe the A15 is very very (i.e nearly indistinguishably) close to the same sound quality?  I realize I might or might not choose to use it's onboard DAC (my current DAC is the DA2 module installed in my C2700 preamp) depending on how it sounds, and indeed the DAC might be "wasted", but there is no N15...

Thanks for any first-hand advice,

 

Mark

mhwilliford

The N200 is a great unit.  Even though its worthy of more I'm sure it will sound fine with the Mac DAC.  Plus I don't think you could have found a better reason to spend even more money, lol.

I love my N200.   Aurender did a recent firmware that added even more virtual stations via "V-Tuner"    They are constantly refining them through software,  their support is excellent overall.   

 

Thanks @oddiofyl I don't mean to start a discussion of Roon vs Conductor, but there are some simple things about Conductor that I am looking forward to - namely rock-solid stability and paused tracks fading out and then back in when un-paused.

Track fade in and out is one of best features ever ,   there is also a 0-5 second delay if your DAC makes any noise when acquiring the signal or when it switches formats

That feature also is of great benefit to me, as my DAC does this depending on format and source.  Completely eliminated with a 3 sec delay before it outputs a signal.  

+1, @oddiofyl

I have been using Conductor for so long, it is easy to overlook or re-iterate some of its brilliant features. Above all, zero impact to sound quality of digital bits, it delivers the sound bits unmolested.