[George Prentice]

I owned Auralic Aries G2... And currently own a Aurender N100 and W20SE. I think the Aurender is in a different class than the Aries. I have heard the Aurender N10. My conclusions... go with Aurender, more natural sound and quieter (much of the improvement with cost is quieting it down). With Aurender you get exactly what you pay for... the N100 -> N10 -> W20SE are all significant jumps in performance, each completely worth it. The new N10 has a redesigned power supply for lower noise, definitely an improvement. I am not familiar with the N20. It sounds like it has expanded USB capability and more storage. If you buy at this level it is likely the AES or other digital out will sound better than the USB output with your current DAC. Unless your DAC is massively better than the streamer I doubt this is important. Even in my situation the AES sounds the same or ever so slightly better They probably made other improvements in the n20 to make the sound better than the N10.


The age of massive stored files locally is over. It is good to have a little local storage... but streaming sounds exactly the same in mine, so local storage of files is for internet outages and feeling like you haven’t thrown away money on all those disks and downloads. I haven’t used anything off of local storage in six months. Qubuz is great.

I think it is safe to buy the most expensive you can afford. My purchases were revelatory and left me happy that I did not invest less. They took me into the digital audiophile world permanently.