AURALiC ARIES as NAA for HQPlayer?

[miguelito]

Wouldn't that be interesting?

[miguelito]

Would it? :-)

It would to me.

[miguelito]

Sorry was being facetious...

 

Just strikes me as every time someone produces a new device; there's always someone who wishes it does something different!

 

It's almost like saying "I've bought a new BMW; I wish it worked as a boat".

Don't be redicurous! This is a very natural use of the ARIES.

 

Having said this, I much prefer focus on TIDAL and Lightning DS improvements.

[miguelito]

Ok seriously... This is not a strange question... After all the ARIES supports both AirPlay and Songcast.

[miguelito]

Well Auralic could put in Spotify Connect and Pandora *properly*.. instead of trying to do things on the cheap and half baked via the Songcast "workaround".. and suddenly open up an entire world of Millions of users.. or put in the NAA or carry on being half baked...

They have to choose what to focus on obviously... And I would argue that given a choice most users would agree TIDAL, USB hard drive support (I personally don't care about this) and Lightning DS stability and tweaks (such as not switching back to Album) are top priorities. Spotify and Pandora streaming are not of high quality enough to trump the other priorities.

 

Now if Spotify or Apple decided to get into lossless streaming then that's an entirely different story. It is only a matter of time.

[miguelito]

I support you on your question, and share the interest. I see myself going to Aries next year, And I also would like to test NAA and HQpayer again. Would make perfect sense to avoid one extra box, and use it as a NAA, the same way that a mini server from SOTM can also act as a NAA....

Yes, absolutely. Thx.

[miguelito]

It is speculative, indeed.

Well, frankly, almost certainly true. Look at the face of AURALiC (only one guy). I'm fully supportive, they are doing an amazing job, and not trying to answer every brain wave people have and instead focus on the important stuff is the proper way to progress. Just look at Apple.

[miguelito]

^ Guys if you cant see why adding apps like Spotify and Pandora properly (so they are accessed *within* the Aires GUI and Lightning app) should be *way* more important for this product than adding NAA, then I'm sorry I've got nothing more to contribute to this thread!

I'm not convinced the people looking at this product care that much about Spotify or Pandora -today- . If either of those, or Apple for that matter, decide to produce a lossless streaming service, then that's a whole different story.

 

Having said this, from a marketing standpoint, I think having Spotify and Pandora would create stronger appeal to some than say implementing an NAA adapter. It might also be way more complicated from a business standpoint (I don't know what the requirements and limitations are for these service from a usage perspective).

[miguelito]

I know Auralic is trying to work something out with Vtuner for Internet radio as well but I already have the 15 stations I wanna listen to already added in the Radio section .

What's a good source for high quality radio station URLs? Thx.

[miguelito]

NAA on the Aries? C'mon Auralic?

[miguelito]

It looks like Roon's integration with HQP is going to leave audio distribution to HQP (at least at first). That makes the Aries as an NAA very interesting.

Exactly my point. Roon + HQP is fantastic, I've been using this for a while now.

[miguelito]

It looks like Roon's integration with HQP is going to leave audio distribution to HQP (at least at first). That makes the Aries as an NAA very interesting.

Yeap but no love yet...

[miguelito]

Wouldn't that be interesting?

So wouldn't this be interesting?

 

Miska? Mr Wang?

[miguelito]

So wouldn't this be interesting?

Miska? Mr Wang?

Got an answer from Auralic: No plans to include NAA in the Aries at this point.

 

microRendu: Can't wait for you to arrive!

[miguelito]

Do report back on what you think.

It's once again disappointing that Auralic hasn't kept its word as far as this is concerned.I thought they were nearer to it as the latest beta firmware has a new feature "Add experimental Upsampler (internal testing only)"

I saw that, but there's not going to be enough juice in that processor to do HQPlayer-level upsampling. I wonder if this is why they won't implement something that is frankly pretty trivial to incorporate as the daemon is provided by Miska. Maybe there's some more to this but I frankly doubt it.

[miguelito]

Do report back on what you think.

Sound of mini+Roon+HQP upsampling > NAA > microRendu > Curious 20cm > DAC is the best I have EVER heard in my system, at so many levels.

 

However, I will hold judgement based on how reliable the microRendu is - if it just works without glitches then that's it. But that'll take a few weeks.

[miguelito]

Thanks for that.

 

And an apples to apples comparison ie. without the HQP upsampling?

Might do when I get a sec... But why would I care? NAA is not coming to Aries.

[miguelito]

By the way, I read on another board (didn't think to copy the link and can't locate it now) that the upcoming Aries upsampling is only to single DSD. So your decision to go microRendu was the correct one.

 

Not sure what sound quality improvements there are from that as some DACs already upsample PCM to DSD anyway.

I think the beta version already does this, but I question the choice of doing upsampling on such a low-power processor. The microRendu also has a low-power processor, but it is just there to render the NAA stream - upsampling happens somewhere else on a powerful computer some place on the network - in my opinion the best of both worlds.