Streamers - Auralic, Aurender, Lumin, others...

@gkelly 

?  You brought up dealers, and specifically asked me a question.  I answered your question.  And I did not accuse any dealer of being unscrupulous, though certainly there are some out there.  They are human after all.  I actually think most dealers want to sell their brands - obviously - so that’s what they know.  They get literature rom the distributor, and that’s what they use to sell to us.  This seems to be pretty noncontroversial, unless you just want to argue for the sake of it.  Don’t you just love the internet?

Having used, auditioned and built multiple streamers and Roon cores over the last few years, I have to comprehensively disagree with the sneering negativity I’ve seen from some towards the Mac Mini: my experience is that it’s a solid, well designed and high quality source/streamer. My empirical playout chain (keeping Ockham’s Razor in mind) has an M1 Mini powered via an Isotek Sigmas, and feeding my DAC over Ethernet, through an Etherregen switch.  Both the power supply and the network connection do make a difference though - I recently had to temporarily move the Mini from the hifi rack to my server cabinet, where the power comes from a basic UPS, and that has definitely degraded the SQ.

I’ve yet to find any streamer whose imposition between the Mac & DAC improves things, but happy to continue, in the spirit of sceptical curiosity.

The only scenario where I’d consider an alternative architecture would be if I were still using HQPlayer downstream of Roon: HQP is better optimised for X64 instruction sets than for ARM-based systems. As it is, HQP makes no difference to the current DAC.

Don’t waste your money, the Eversolo T8 is the one to get. 

Why is it there is always one person who can't "cope" (as per Darko's latest video on audiophile behavior) with other people spending insane money chasing the 1 to 5% improvement.  Hifi as a hobby is still nothing compared to people spending insane money on Rolex watches and beef up their BMW.  Get over it please as it's just annoying.  From my own experience listening to these people are just a waste of my time.  Yes, I tried the Wiim and whatever and in my highly revealing system they are total rubbish.  Luck for Amazon return policy but it's still a waste of my time.  In Hifi, you are still getting what you paid for.  Unfortunately this is still true so please get over it.

I have the Aurender N200 and it’s been solid as a rock and it sounds good too. Their software is easy to use.  The only two things I would like them to change are

1: there’s no I2S output.

2: Amazon Music HD is not a service they support.

All the best.