Best DAC to go with Aurender N100H?

Mabonn,

An Aurender N100H will sound good with any dac.

There are way more good dacs then just the ones you have mentioned.

You should determine the kind of sound and qualities you like and what you want to bring out in your system.

The Chords tend toward detail and resolution, good soundstaging but are not known for tone and musicality.

The Meturm’s and NOS dacs are known for an oragnic quality and an ease of listenablity.

If you haven’t purchased a server you may want to look at an server/dac which would combine both pieces into one chassis as well.

Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ

You asked for our recommendation and that is an easy one.

Lumin T2 which is dramatically better than the older T1.

The Lumin T2 is a next generation platform and shares much of the sound quality of the Lumin Reference X1.

The Lumin has a wonderful mix of liquidity, and detail. The T2 floats both a wide and deep soundstage and has a very well balanced combination of good treble detail and a clean midrange without sounding bright.

The Lumin has many advantages over other streamers:

1: Dual ESS 9028 pro dacs run one per channel this enables the internal dac to process dual differential equations which generates much less distortion.

2: Full MQA decoding

3: Roon Capable

4: Can be used as both an Spdif and a full USB transport if you ever want to upgrade to an exterernal dac.

5: Great easy to use app with Spotify, Qubuzz, Tidal

6: Apple Airplay built in

7: Very reliable, over the air upgrades.

8: Allows you to upconvert and transcode PCM to DSD or play files natively, this means you can upconvert Tidal to DSD or to high oversampled PCM>

Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ Lumin Dealers

Yes the Lumin T2 can be used as a dedicated USB server so in the future you can move to an even better dac.


Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ Lumin dealers

nekoaudio, there is no comparison between the older Lumin A1 or T1 vs the new T2 platform. 

On paper the T1 or A1 with the Lundhal transformers and outboard linear power supply should sound better, but that would be suicide for a manufactuer to make a new product which isn't better than the older series.

So the T2 with the dual Ess chips still handily outperforms the older units sonically run the T2 as a DSD upconverter and the sound is a bit lusher and the T2 just sounds amazing. Huge 3d soundstage, great resolution and it is still very musical.

The bingster, the built in Hegel dacs are good but do have a sound which is clean with good details, but the built in dac would be equvilent to probably a $1,200-2,000 externral dac from Hegel.

The Aqua Hifi Dacs are much more liquid sounding, so it is not surprising that you found a $4k outboard dac that would sound better. 

The Aqua Hifi La Voice MK III is even better than your older MK II the nice thing with Aqua is you can upgrade your older model into the current one pretty easily as you have found out, give the MK III upgrades a few hundred hours and you will see the improvements in the MK III they actually replace quite a number of boads so the break in is substantial. 

Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ Lumin and Aqua Dealers

Rbstereno, please get your facts straight, we are a dealer for Lumin because the Lumin products are consistantly some of the best sounding and best designed audio products out there...period.

We also sell a ton of great dacs.

If you look at Lumins reviews they are universally rated as making some of the best gear in each of their price points, they are famous for service, support, upgradability via fimrware upgrades.

Lumin is a giant company with resourses much greater than many tiny, tiny audio companies. Their parent company makes most of the cable boxes used in Asia as well as building broadcast video products. 

Lumin's products are based on real engineering not flavor of the month parts and concepts which is why it has taken five years for them to beat their older platform. To this day a five year old Lumin A1 will still outperform many brand new dacs how do we know this because we had an A1 traded in and it still sounded ridiculously musical.

And in terms of your facts about FPGA again totally wrong, many manufactureres used FPGA to hold software, what is or is not relevant is if the company is offering upgrades to that core. 

In the case of Chord whose dacs are FPGA  based they almost never offer upgrades to their software as the code is a mature code honned over many years and there is no reason to change it as it is not possible for Robert Watts to come up with an improved version of the ideas and execution of his transient and time aligned digital filter. 

FPGA is just a way of being able to hold software that is easy to change. 

Lumin has added MQA and was one of the first to support it as well as Roon and they did that via an over the air upgrade!

Other issues is jitter transmitted from a server to a dac, you have a huge reduction in noise and jitter with an all in one streamer/dac not to mention you usually save money, howerver, we have seen in our testing that an Innnous server feeding an ethernet dac over ethernet did sound signfigantly better via the Innous feeding it then via a direct ethernet connection to the router.

As per our any comment, come on how many people are going to pay $2,800.00 for a server and use it with a $300 dac? Common sense means that this person would be looking at a suitable dac priced from $2k-5k.

Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ