The "Official" Aurender Discussion Thread

[HifiVoice]

The Aurender page mentioning ROON is also back online (it was removed for a couple of weeks):
https://aurender.com/home/roon_ready/

 

I assume it still needs to come with a System Software update and a Conductor update before it will work. 

[HifiVoice]

34 minutes ago, Mazza said:

So that’s it then, the future development of the Conductor App is screwed. A sad day for those of us with absolutely no interest in Roon. 

 

You can also stream to an Aurender via Airplay, and still the Conductor App is running. So I wouldn't conclude this. 

 

Aurender states that Conductor is there for the best sound quality. In 3 other situations (Aurender, PC, Ayre EX-8)  we did compare ROON with other ways of streaming (Conductor, Airplay, JPlay, UPnP, ROON, Audinirvana), and ROON was mostly not amongst the best sound quality wise. ROON is a nice encyclopaedic discovery tool, and to me it is nice when I can see the cover art on the N200 when doing so. 

Another thing missing in the Aurender is a parametric EQ. I have a 30Hz bump in my room, and with ROON I can cancel it with a few mouse clicks. 

[HifiVoice]

26 minutes ago, DancingSea said:

 

It's some weird Aurender relationship with Mac permissions....  have been a Mac user for 40 years and have only seen these oddities with Conductor.  

 

I have this very rarely. Sometimes holding the command-option key when deleting a file and emptying the trash helps. 

 

If that doesn't help, start up the Terminal app (it is in the Utilities folder in the application folder), and remove the file with a command. 

 

You can do it with the command rm <path-to-file> and press return, or when that doesn't work rm -f <path-to-file> (which is a forcing a deletion without checking file permissions). 

 

As the path to the filename is not always easy to guess, you can type the command "rm" and a space, and drag the file to the Terminal window. It will then insert the correct file name (which also with spaces can be a bit tricky with all the backlashes that you need to insert). See an example below, where I dragged the first file into the Terminal: 

 

When you want to remove a compete directory, use rm -rf <path-to-directory>

 

Be careful selecting the right files and directory, executing such a command is permanent and irreversible. So if you select the wrong directory or file, it is gone forever after executing the command when pressing return. 

 

[HifiVoice]

13 minutes ago, SirAtilla said:

Finder on macOS has quite a few quirks that have gotten better over the years but its underlying support of old HFS/HFS+ and now APFS file systems that have different fundamental capabilities leads to some debt.  Items like resource forks, extended attributes, .DS_Store, and various other things can lead to unnecessary items being written to the Aurender file system.

 

If you want to get rid of all the "unnecessary" items on you Aurender volume, you can run the following command in Terminal:

 

  dot_clean -n <directory or volume>

 

E.g.   dot_clean -n /Volumes/Music1/

[HifiVoice]

11 minutes ago, SirAtilla said:

 

Good suggestion but I think this will only merge files in format ._*.  A useful command for sure.

 

The -n option will also remove the dot file when there is a matching native file. I always use it when transferring files from the Mac to an exFAT drive. Works well for my use-case. 

[HifiVoice]

19 minutes ago, DancingSea said:

I've whipped out an email to Korea for an explanation!

 

This is what they mailed me about 2 weeks ago:

 

"While I can't provide a specific timeline, please rest assured that the project is actively under development. We anticipate sharing some positive updates soon, so stay tuned."

[HifiVoice]

On 4/3/2024 at 2:59 PM, SirAtilla said:

 

The context of this was lost in a few posts - we are discussing strictly whether streaming from Qobuz/TIDAL caches onto the playback SSD.  According to Eric it does not.

 

Not sure if Eric intends to say that. He says you need internet to play the song, and it is not "cached" in the sense that you can play the file from the cache-SSD as an isolated file on your Aurender without internet. This is in line with an earlier message posted by Aurender: 

 

Later on he corrects himself that Internet Radio (IR) is not cached, because it is a continuous stream:

 

I can imagine from SW perspective it makes sense to have a similar approach to all streams. Question to me would be if ROON streams are handled the same? 

[HifiVoice]

19 hours ago, feelingears said:

 

Hi, @HifiVoice

I'm curious if you'd share your impressions of what was the better sounding stream, and what the server software was for the stream, please?

 

It's quite a story, and not only Aurender related, so I will only spend a few words on it. 

 

The first setup is at a friends place, who uses a heavily customised PC with USB output as a source. The USB card is supplied with batteries (which is a huge audible improvement over a normal regulated supply). The reference setup is with JPlay as the software to play music. Compared to other SW, its timbre is more balanced (body vs mid/treble), the treble is more refined (cymbals singing and flanging richer and less sharp), and especially the 3D image is better (sources are less smeared from left-right, and the overall stage is larger). When you play the same source files via ROON, it sounds thinner, less harmonic rich and flatter as if it comes from the left and the right speaker. Boosting it with HQPlayer gives some improvements, but it doesn't reach the sound quality level of JPlay.

 

In my own setup (N200H USB --> Ayre QB-9 Twenty XLR --> Ayre EX-8) playing a file via the Conductor natively on the Aurender gives a similar difference as described above compared to streaming the "same" file via ROON and Airplay to the Aurender. You might think it is due to the Airplay protocol, but when streaming ROON directly to the Ayre EX-8 (it has a network entry and can serve as a ROON endpoint, so no resampling), it shows similar differences. You can improve it a bit by letting ROON transform a stream to DSD by its own processing. 

 

For that reason I'm curious how ROON works with the Aurender as an ROON-ready endpoint. Why ROON? Nice encyclopaedic interface, and it gives me the option with EQ to remove the 30 Hz peak in my listening room that is annoying with some popular music. 

 

I also got the option since 2 days as a beta-tester to test it (it works :-)), and I hope in the weekend I find some time to test it in depth. I will report my findings. 

 

[HifiVoice]

38 minutes ago, HifiVoice said:

 

Not sure if Eric intends to say that. He says you need internet to play the song, and it is not "cached" in the sense that you can play the file from the cache-SSD as an isolated file on your Aurender without internet. 

 

I forgot to quote this post:

[HifiVoice]

3 hours ago, DancingSea said:

 

Yes, but that's just an urban legend, a myth caused by a combination of less than forthright marketing by Aurender and the over active imagination of audiophile customers.

 

Those post to which you refer are simply incorrect.  Apparently, in all the years this thread has been active, no one thought to actually ask Aurender if it was true 😂

 

What information is your assertion based on? Just a note; the answers are from Aurender USA.  

 

A friend of mine is making his own SW player on a Windows PC. He tries to disable as many processes as possible, with the mandatory processes still enabled to keep the PC alive and operatable,. His target is to let the player process to be one of the single processes still active, and create as little side effects as possible. Also the packets sizes to transmit to the USB port, to create a continuous stream of data instead of bursts of data is being explored and optimised. I can confirm (with many other listeners) that different settings do make quite some differences to the perceived sound. 

 

I suspect Aurender is doing something similar.  In line with that, the N200 gives the option to disable the front display and other processes. When you need to keep a bursty streaming process going while also playing music, lots of (in this case Linux) processes need to be active, having an impact to the power supplies that need to supply whole system, and creating ground bounce effects on ICs, and imposing current/voltage variations to the surrounding circuitry. You can attenuate these effects with dedicated circuits, but not completely eliminate them. 

[HifiVoice]

1 hour ago, DancingSea said:

As I've written numerous times, this week I posed the Quboz cache question directly to Eric Shim, who is the "Lead Software Engineer" at Aurender today.  

 

"Except for local, NAS, and USB files, no other content will be cached."

 

 

Whatever Eric says, if you unplug the ethernet of your Aurender, and a song that still keeps on playing for 5 or 8 minutes, can only imply it is cached/buffered (functional the same in this respect) somewhere in your Aurender. Whether the caching is in RAM or on the SSD, may be open for discussion, as multiple sources from Aurender seem to claim something ambiguous. So let's just do a bit of  Google search, and we find an interview from Darko with the CEO of Aurender:

 

Me: Music played from the internal HDD it buffered into the SSD before playback by MPD, right?

HL: Yes.
Me: What about music streamed from an attached USB drive? Does that get buffered into the SSD first?
HL: Yes, it is cached to SSD.
Me: Finally – what about UPnP sources on the LAN? And what about Tidal? Do they see SSD buffering?
HL: Music from a NAS is cached to SSD too but we do not use UPnP as you have mentioned. We use NAS as a simple file server. On Tidal, we do not cache to SSD but we buffer to the RAM and we buffer the whole song. You can play the song from Tidal and wait for a while, pull out the LAN cable from the Aurender and you will still hear the entire song. Caching to SSD is considered offline play and for that there are rules to follow. We have not implemented them yet. When we do, Tidal songs will be cached to the SSD.

 

source: https://www.hansaudio.nl/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Review-Aurender-N100H-Darko-Audio.pdf

 

The interview is from 2015, maybe in the meantime caching is done to the SSD. I would say, "who cares".  

 

Now you may start nitpicking on the wording buffering versus caching. A cache focus on storing frequently accessed data to reduce latency, while buffers focus on temporarily holding data during transfers to optimize the flow of data between different components or processes. The purpose of the SSD in the Aurender is to serve as a buffer as well, not as a cache (unless you play the same segment of music over and over again). 

[HifiVoice]

5 hours ago, DancingSea said:

To clarify, it is Aurender who declares SSD caching as superior to buffering.  It’s one of their key reasons to buy an Aurender over the competition. 

 

Like the AS founder said in his earlier posting, although the concepts may look all the same, the devil is in the implementation (and the possibilities that the operating system is providing to create certain implementations).

 

The friend of mine who is making his own player, has heavily experimented with the way packets are fetched from an audio file (be it HDD, SSD or a buffer in RAM). The packets sizes and the frequency of fetching from a storage has a high impact on cache misses of the central CPU (interfering with existing processes of the OS), having a huge difference in page-ins and page-outs of the processor cache to the DRAM background memory. Especially (high frequency) DRAM traffic creates spikes on your power supplies, and affects the timing of the signalling in your device. HDD access with motors does have quite some effect on power supplies current-wise, and it prevents wear of disks, and here the SSD is primarily intended to offload the HDD, and here also serves as a true cache (on top of the buffer function). 

 

You can measure (not evident!) those kind of effects back on (1) the power supply of the USB card or (2) on the input signal of the USB card (which will create ground bounce effects on the receiving chip, so even if you use separated power supplies the effect will enter that domain). 

 

We can only speculate at this time whether Aurender may have found some implementation that to them creates the "best results". Typically those things are differentiating company secrets, so they might not reveal too much about such a topic. A generic remark that SSD buffering is purely marketing, because they also do DRAM buffering for certain use cases, to me also belongs to the world of speculation, just like a remark that SSD caching is in general superior to buffering. It depends on the implementation. 

[HifiVoice]

Back to the topic, ROON on Aurender. I did some auditions on the beta release, and I can tell it works flawless. 

 

Sound quality wise the differences between Conductor and ROON are small. Conductor sounds a bit more refined, airy and delineated than ROON, and positions the sound stage a little bit more backward in the 3D image, but the differences are very subtle. If you walk out of the room, and come back and ask someone “what is playing now”, I don't think you will be able to tell, maybe after a few days learning the subtle differences you might be better able to. 

 

You can see a small logo "ROON ready" in the top right corner. Switching between Conductor and ROON works like a charm. 

 

Marc is happy 😃

 

 

 

[HifiVoice]

4 hours ago, GJo said:

I may be doing it incorrectly, but I find switching from Roon to Conductor requires a device restart (N30SA). 

 

This is probably the reason that it is stil in beta, and some of these things require a bit more software engineering before making an official software release. 

[HifiVoice]

9 hours ago, GJo said:

What I tried this morning when Roon was enabled and controlling the N30SA was to disable Roon in Conductor 4. Then, I was a able to stream using Conductor without an N30SA restart. 
 

To use Roon once again, I simply enabled Roon in Conductor, selected the N30SA in Roon and began streaming. 

On my N200, when switching from ROON to Conductor, the music plays instantly, but I do get a few seconds a message on the Aurender screen that ROON lost control. Switching from Conductor to ROON gives an instant change on the Aurender screen. 

[HifiVoice]

12 hours ago, GJo said:

What steps specifically do you take switching from Roon to Conductor?

 

I pause the file playing in Roon, then press play on a file in Conductor. It plays instantly, and a few seconds later the artwork appears. 

[HifiVoice]

9 hours ago, VoicesInMyHead said:

I agree with how you describe the differences, but would actually stretch it to that Roon to me sounds muffled and flat in comparison.

 

I would say ROON sounds a bit more pushy and oppressive, and bit forward, but not muffled or flat to me. 

[HifiVoice]

4 hours ago, GJo said:

That said, we all hear and evaluate differently. What he evaluates as small, you may consider large. Also, you may both discern varying characteristics.

 

When streaming ROON via Airplay to the Aurender, the SQ differences with Conductor were much larger.  

[HifiVoice]

4 hours ago, Anonamemouse said:

Good sound quality stands or falls with how the music is recorded, mixed and mastered, and modern mastering (although it really should be called butchering) usually completely kills all dynamics and musicality. 

 

In classical music on the contrary, lots of good recording techniques and brilliant sounding records in the last years. 

 

3 hours ago, Anonamemouse said:

This guy can PERFECTLY tune a single string just by hearing alone. I trust him blindly. 

 

I can do that as well. When searching for a new guitar I tuned some guitars I tried out by hearing. The shop owner went for a tuning fork. "Not needed" I told her. She still did and checked, and my tuning was spot on (usually I deviate with like 0,5-1 Hz). I enjoyed the surprising look on her face. But, being tonal correct, doesn't mean you hear other things as good as well, like overall timbre and group delay. 

[HifiVoice]

11 minutes ago, GJo said:

In my system, Roon Core is installed on a MacMini optimized for audio and connected to my home network via WiFi. No wired connection.

 

This configuration in my system has equaled self-contained Roon Core devices like Antipodes K50 and Rockna WaveDreamNET. 

 

My Roon core runs on an iMac, wired to the main router. The Aurender is connected via an AirPort Express, that connects via WiFi to the main router, and is wired with ethernet to the Aurender. I also can stream to an Ayre EX-8 2.0, that is connected via a WiFi antenna connection. Both have zero problems. 

[HifiVoice]

8 minutes ago, DancingSea said:

 

Yes, HQPlayer has a steep initial learning curve.  But once you figure out it's byzantine GUI, it's actually quite easy to use with Roon.  Once setup, there's nothing else to do but launch HQP along with Roon, the rest is automatic.  From there one can easily tweak HQPlayer's settings for a variety of music.  I have 3 settings I prefer, and can quickly change them.

 

But it did take some dedication to learn HQP's language.

 

Can you still stream to the Aurender with HQPlayer in-between? 

[HifiVoice]

8 minutes ago, krass said:

 

I believe there is a “Clone” function in the Conductor app menu.

I never used it and no longer have my Aurender to check, but pretty sure I saw a function that is used to transfer across to a new Aurender….

 

Yes, I used it to copy the files from my old N100H to my new N200 (about 2,5TB of music). When I tried to this via WiFi, it anticipated a disastrous couple of days copy time. I acquired a Ethernet hub, and the copy was done in about a night. 

 

What is missing (due to legal reasons), is the option to copy the music to an external disk, and then copy it from there to the new Aurender. 

[HifiVoice]

1 hour ago, mike1127 said:

Aurender customer support seems to be busy right at this moment. Sent an email three days ago and haven't heard from them. I left a phone call and got a message about them being at a show or something. But I assume they will become responsive again.

 

Got an email from them today, excusing for the delayed response as they are very hectic with all sort of things including preparing the AXPONA show, and a recent upgrade of their support systems. Until now, they have always helped me with whatever request I have sent to them, I think there support deserves a 10 out of 10. 

[HifiVoice]

4 hours ago, Anonamemouse said:

Wellicht moet ik Engels met een Vlaams accent typen?

 

Somebody is trying to help you, why react like this? 

[HifiVoice]

ROON announcement:

 

https://aurender.com/roon_ready/