£23k Streamer improves £700 dac

[Purité Audio]

Seems reasonable £23k streamer ( inaudibly) improves £700 dac,

Aurender W20SE Network Audio Library Lab Report

Lab Report In common with the Melco N10/2 [HFN Apr '22] and Aurender's own N200 [HFN Jun '22], the W20SE music storage/player is also a transcoding/signal conditioning device. Other 'conditioning' network bridges include the Innuos Statement [HFN Jan '20], Aqua LinQ [HFN Sep '20], Grimm Audio...

www.hifinews.com

I value your opinions as always.
Keith

 

[phoenixdogfan]

Instead of Aurender shouldn't it be called something like Walletsurrender or Savingsender?

 

[Purité Audio]

Odd really the ‘subjective’ part of the review disparages the ‘bits are bits’ cohort and then the technical part doesn’t deliver the £23k worth of improvement over simply using your laptop.
Keith

 

[ZolaIII]

A cheap laptop as a DLNA streamer and DSP procesor is light years ahead and enable format conversation and processing on the flight. Galvanic isolation will improve performance of a bad overpriced DAC (to a extent) but you don't need to borrow it from even worse snake oil product nor to have such in a fight place.

 

[fatoldgit]

The upshot from the lab report is dont spend your money on something like that but spend $2K on a Mytek Brooklyn DAC in conjunction with a well measuring but cheap and cheerful PC source, connected by USB and running your software of choice.

Not PC literate?..pay someone for a couple of hours work to set the PC up.

Job done and your bank account will thank you.

What is always missing from the companies that market these types of expensive products (which are always based on commodity motherboards) is what were the measured incremental improvements at the outputs (spdif/usb) as they applied their bits of "secret sauce".

For example, what real world improvement does running this off the batteries really provide... and what was the comparisons (stock switching PSU/LPS/external battery... which can all be had for chump change).

I was also bemused (among many things) by the fact that the "cache" is in fact an SSD drive and they claim that by using an SSD drive as cache separate from the SSD drives that store your music, this magically improves the sound. How?

Both are SSD drives with the same level of intrinsic noise.

Also why 1TB for the cache. A typical CD quality album is 650MB and a typical internet stream is running at ~200kilobytes/second so its hard to see why you need such a large cache that will never ever be filled up.

Double USB isolation?. Get a Topping HS01/HS02 which are proven to work and cost bugger all.

Anyways, always amusing to see these products and its hard to see where the money they want is actually represented in the BOM.

Peter

 

[pjn]

Seems reasonable £23k streamer ( inaudibly) improves £700 dac,

Aurender W20SE Network Audio Library Lab Report

Lab Report In common with the Melco N10/2 [HFN Apr '22] and Aurender's own N200 [HFN Jun '22], the W20SE music storage/player is also a transcoding/signal conditioning device. Other 'conditioning' network bridges include the Innuos Statement [HFN Jan '20], Aqua LinQ [HFN Sep '20], Grimm Audio...

www.hifinews.com

I value your opinions as always.
Keith

Back in the previous century I used to occasionally read HiFi news and RR - I quite enjoyed it. Recently I thought I'd see whether my judgement was impaired in those days and subscribed (cheaply on line) for a year. I did not enjoy the experience. When I see this sort of meaningless verbal spaghetti I realize my judgement 40+ years ago was indeed suspect.

 

[charleski]

Odd really the ‘subjective’ part of the review disparages the ‘bits are bits’ cohort and then the technical part doesn’t deliver the £23k worth of improvement over simply using your laptop.
Keith

I think the take-home message here is pretty damning for the iFi DAC, especially compared to the Mytek:

If your USB implementation requires an over-engineered and over-priced host interface to keep its clock on target, then it's broken.