The "Official" Aurender Discussion Thread

[Anonamemouse]

48 minutes ago, NTWrong said:

Actually, we do know the difference between buffering and streaming, which would be clear if you had read the posts earlier in this thread. What I don’t know about is how streaming services work. (I play all my music back from the user-installed SSDs.) 

 

Streaming is not like radio. I can go in and choose the tracks that I want to stream, whereas radio is just a constant stream of data so that you can’t choose a track; you hear whatever song is being played at any given time.
 

In theory, then, when I select Money For Nothing from Qobuz, my N200 could download that track and cache it in the internal SSD. I take it from you and @DancingSea that isn’t what happens.

 

But that makes me wonder what the purpose of the SSD cache is. What’s the point of taking a file that I have stored on an internal SSD and loading it into a different SSD before playback. Either way, it’s playing back from an SSD. 

 

Which is why I figured the SSD cache was primarily beneficial to streaming music. But I accept @DancingSea’s answer, since he’s talking directly to someone who knows. 

Actually, streaming *is* like radio. The playlist you create is stitched together to one long stream. And the moment you decide you want to interrupt that stream, it is cut off and a new part of the stream is attached. 

 

 

[The Computer Audiophile]

In audio playback, like other areas of life, absolute statements are frequenly incorrect. There are many ways to handle audio streams and many different companies trying to differentiate themselves with creative ways to play these streams back. 

 

Every time I've talked to people behind these scenes, I've heard about little differences or exceptions to how things are thought to work. Plus, none of this is static like CD playback. A streaming service change, software / firmware change, or even contractual change, can turn what we know on its head. 

[NTWrong]

2 hours ago, Anonamemouse said:

Actually, streaming *is* like radio. The playlist you create is stitched together to one long stream. And the moment you decide you want to interrupt that stream, it is cut off and a new part of the stream is attached. 

 

 

Even if you have a queue that mixes tracks from Qobuz, Tidal, and Spotify with locally stored tracks? That is possible, correct? (Asking because I don’t stream.)

 

The creation of playlists that may include tracks from multiple sources is another reason I had the (evidently mistaken) idea that the whole playlist was cached for uninterrupted playback. And, FWIW, that would be nothing like radio.

[DancingSea]

4 hours ago, NTWrong said:

But that makes me wonder what the purpose of the SSD cache is. What’s the point of taking a file that I have stored on an internal SSD and loading it into a different SSD before playback. Either way, it’s playing back from an SSD

 

This is something I do not have an expert opinion on, and my own knowledge is limited.  My best guess is that "in the beginning" music servers like the Aurender depended upon a traditional mechanical hard drive in order to store lots of music.  Large SSD's were a practical and actual impossibility, or would've been prohibitively expensive.  If you wanted to have a 2TB storage hard drive, it had to be mechanical.  But that spinning mechanical disk is noisy, and not ideal for the aims of a high end device that seeks to reduce noise wherever possible.  Therefore they added the quieter SSD to cache the music before playback.

 

Times change and SSD's become just as affordable as mechanical HD's.  But a key marketing point is the cache.  And who knows, maybe going from one SSD to another does reduce noise?  But it would take some hard evidence to convince me it does.  In theory, having the extra step might cause more noise?  I honestly don't know.

 

FWIW, Auralic seems to think a SSD cache is a misstep to begin with.  They use system memory (Direct Data Recording) instead of a hard drive cache.  Are they correct?  Or is just their own marketing speak?

 

There's something to be said for not paying too close attention to how the sausage is made, but instead focus on how it tastes.  We the people, the unwashed masses, aren't privy to data that clearly shows which cache system is less noisy, nor precisely how that one caching component differentiates one product's overall sound from another - Aurender vs Auralic for example.

 

If your Aurender sounds great, that's all it need be.  There are many more sausage ingredients than the cache.

[DancingSea]

1 hour ago, NTWrong said:

The creation of playlists that may include tracks from multiple sources is another reason I had the (evidently mistaken) idea that the whole playlist was cached for uninterrupted playback. And, FWIW, that would be nothing like radio.

 

The streaming part of that playlist would essentially be like radio.  A sophisticated 2024 radio.  The Aurender is essentially a fancy computer, thus seamlessly stitching together locally stored files with streaming is super easy for such a computer.

[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? 

[The Computer Audiophile]

On a somewhat related topic, I wrote about buffers and streams a few years ago. Things didn’t necessarily work the way many armchair experts said they would. 

 

 

 

[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:

[DancingSea]

Out of curiosity, who is @rwwjr44 and what is his relationship to Aurender?  In the "about me" section of his user profile, it says he is a "mostly retired college professor."

 

Seeing him quoted multiples times recently, I'm curious as to why?  What is his level of Aurender expertise?

 

My recent email exchanges have been with Eric Shim, the current lead software engineer at Aurender.  He was unambiguous and definitive, streaming music is in no way cached to the Aurender's solid state cache drive.  Only locally stored files get cached.

 

My baseless assumption is that Roon likely will not get cached either, local files or streaming, because Roon's core exists outside of the Aurender architecture. 

[rwwjr44]

44 minutes ago, DancingSea said:

Out of curiosity, who is @rwwjr44 and what is his relationship to Aurender?  In the "about me" section of his user profile, it says he is a "mostly retired college professor."

 

Seeing him quoted multiples times recently, I'm curious as to why?  What is his level of Aurender expertise?

 

My recent email exchanges have been with Eric Shim, the current lead software engineer at Aurender.  He was unambiguous and definitive, streaming music is in no way cached to the Aurender's solid state cache drive.  Only locally stored files get cached.

 

My baseless assumption is that Roon likely will not get cached either, local files or streaming, because Roon's core exists outside of the Aurender architecture. 

I am a long time audiophile. I started this thread shortly after I bought a demo S10 and had lots of questions about Aurender equipment. In those days communications with Aurender personnel was sporadic since they were getting their US operation better organized. I am on my fourth Aurender and had to do a lot of personal research to learn the quirks of some of the early units.

 

I taught computer science at Hampton University for 25 years and still teach online graduate classes there. I was more active in various threads on this site but have had to curtail most “fun” web use due to an uptick in my Cyber Security research. 

[DancingSea]

1 hour ago, rwwjr44 said:

I am a long time audiophile. I started this thread shortly after I bought a demo S10 and had lots of questions about Aurender equipment. In those days communications with Aurender personnel was sporadic since they were getting their US operation better organized. I am on my fourth Aurender and had to do a lot of personal research to learn the quirks of some of the early units.

 

I taught computer science at Hampton University for 25 years and still teach online graduate classes there. I was more active in various threads on this site but have had to curtail most “fun” web use due to an uptick in my Cyber Security research. 

Nice to meet you. 
 

[SirAtilla]

6 hours 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. 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? 

 

This definitely aligns more to my experience with Qobuz content that it appears it was using the local playback SSD.  Thanks for the follow-up post.

[DancingSea]

11 minutes ago, SirAtilla said:

 

This definitely aligns more to my experience with Qobuz content that it appears it was using the local playback SSD.  Thanks for the follow-up post.

 

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 😂

[NTWrong]

9 hours ago, DancingSea said:

 

This is something I do not have an expert opinion on, and my own knowledge is limited.  My best guess is that "in the beginning" music servers like the Aurender depended upon a traditional mechanical hard drive in order to store lots of music.  Large SSD's were a practical and actual impossibility, or would've been prohibitively expensive.  If you wanted to have a 2TB storage hard drive, it had to be mechanical.  But that spinning mechanical disk is noisy, and not ideal for the aims of a high end device that seeks to reduce noise wherever possible.  Therefore they added the quieter SSD to cache the music before playback.

 

Times change and SSD's become just as affordable as mechanical HD's.  But a key marketing point is the cache.  And who knows, maybe going from one SSD to another does reduce noise?  But it would take some hard evidence to convince me it does.  In theory, having the extra step might cause more noise?  I honestly don't know.

 

FWIW, Auralic seems to think a SSD cache is a misstep to begin with.  They use system memory (Direct Data Recording) instead of a hard drive cache.  Are they correct?  Or is just their own marketing speak?

 

There's something to be said for not paying too close attention to how the sausage is made, but instead focus on how it tastes.  We the people, the unwashed masses, aren't privy to data that clearly shows which cache system is less noisy, nor precisely how that one caching component differentiates one product's overall sound from another - Aurender vs Auralic for example.

 

If your Aurender sounds great, that's all it need be.  There are many more sausage ingredients than the cache.

Totally with you on your last point. My N200 sounds fabulous. I’ve never had such consistently good, pleasurable sound from my system before. (I also found an optimal set of tubes for my PS Audio preamp (hybrid design) so that’s a contributing factor, too.)

 

I like to understand the design of my gear because sometimes the info comes in useful. But my confusion about the Aurender design doesn’t detract from my enjoyment of it! 
 

And your point about noisy HDD is a good one. Similarly, it occurred to me that the Aurender could also be connected to a music server, and caching tracks from it. Could be there’s a sonic benefit to that arrangement. 

[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. 

[SirAtilla]

10 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 😂

 

I respectfully disagree like I said based on "experiential" data.  I re-did my experiment again before this post and anybody else can reproduce it on their own Aurender.

 

1. I went to latest releases on Qobuz via Conductor and chose a song 5:05 long and clicked play
2. To add additional data to my experiment I added a 2nd song from Qobuz to the queue
3. I let the song play for 10 seconds and then paused it via Conductor - I chose 10 seconds for adequate download time - this was a track in 24 bit/96 kHz resolution
4. I then disabled the switched port to my Aurender and within 2 seconds Conductor was disconnected from the Aurender
5. Using the physical buttons on the Aurender I resumed playback
6. The song played with no network connection to completion - another 4:55
7. The 2nd song in queue did not play which indicates there is no pre-fetch of queue content

My conclusion, as it was before when I did this experiment, is that at least for Qobuz content, the track is completely downloaded to the playback SSD.  If there was some sorta of largish RAM buffer memory based playback like what PS Audio did with the DirectStream memory player, I am sure they would have marketed this.  

[jrsub]

40 minutes ago, SirAtilla said:

 

I respectfully disagree like I said based on "experiential" data.  I re-did my experiment again before this post and anybody else can reproduce it on their own Aurender.

 

1. I went to latest releases on Qobuz via Conductor and chose a song 5:05 long and clicked play
2. To add additional data to my experiment I added a 2nd song from Qobuz to the queue
3. I let the song play for 10 seconds and then paused it via Conductor - I chose 10 seconds for adequate download time - this was a track in 24 bit/96 kHz resolution
4. I then disabled the switched port to my Aurender and within 2 seconds Conductor was disconnected from the Aurender
5. Using the physical buttons on the Aurender I resumed playback
6. The song played with no network connection to completion - another 4:55
7. The 2nd song in queue did not play which indicates there is no pre-fetch of queue content

My conclusion, as it was before when I did this experiment, is that at least for Qobuz content, the track is completely downloaded to the playback SSD.  If there was some sorta of largish RAM buffer memory based playback like what PS Audio did with the DirectStream memory player, I am sure they would have marketed this.  

This is  how it works on my N200.    In a test I did I added an entire Qobuz album to the queue and started playback on a track that was  8:02 long.  I let the track play for about a minute or so and then unplugged the network cable without pausing.  The track continued to play  with no network connection to the end of 8:02  and the second track did not play at all.   

[NTWrong]

3 hours ago, jrsub said:

This is  how it works on my N200.    In a test I did I added an entire Qobuz album to the queue and started playback on a track that was  8:02 long.  I let the track play for about a minute or so and then unplugged the network cable without pausing.  The track continued to play  with no network connection to the end of 8:02  and the second track did not play at all.   

Thank you, to you and @SirAtilla. This information makes sense of the conflicting responses above. A single track evidently is cached to the SSD prior to playback, but only the one track—not an entire album or playlist. 

[The Computer Audiophile]

Also note, a cached track isn’t deleted immediately after playback. Streamed content has contractual time limits, local content obviously doesn’t. An entire playlist or queue could be cached. 

[DancingSea]

13 hours ago, HifiVoice said:

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

 

(this is also to @SirAtilla)

 

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.  He's not a sales rep, he's not a customer service agent, Eric Shim is - by his own signature line in his email - the head of software programming at Aurender in 2024.

 

In fact, on his Linkedin page, he has been the lead engineer since Aurender was created in 2010. There is no human being more familiar with what is cached or not than Eric Shim.  Ari Margolis, who is fantastic, was only a sales rep and customer service extraordinaire - and not an engineer.

 

Once again, this week I wrote to the standard support email address asking about Quboz and the cache, assuming Kelly would respond, but instead it was Mr Shim who wrote:

 

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

 

I think it's unreasonable to conclude that Mr Shim is incorrect in that statement.  Doing so would be like concluding Julia Child didn't know the ingredients of her famous Vichyssoise.

 

I have no personal opinion on this, I'm 100% relying upon the email from Eric Shim.  Assuming Mr Shim knows what he's talking about - it that seems a safe assumption - I can only speculate (and reasonably so) that @SirAtilla's experiment is likely revealing a buffering of some sort in the system's memory that is not related to the SSD cache.  Just because the marketing fluff doesn't emphasize the system memory (buffering), doesn't mean it does not exist.  It's reasonable to conclude that the Aurender marketing team is not posting entire schematics in their marketing material.  They are emphasizing the positive in a relatively brief manner.   "240 GB SSD Cache" is a lot more sexy in marketing than talking about the inner workings of the system memory.  And blasting "but streaming content is not cached" is not sexy either.

 

The buffering of a single Quboz song would not require very much system memory.

 

Rather than quote posts from far less knowledgable sources like Ari, or conduct experiments which have no way of truly revealing the internal architecture, I encourage you both to reach out to Eric Shim via email (he's in Korea I believe) and ask him about these details.  Only he can either correct, or clarify his email to me, and explain about how the buffering system works and compares to the SSD cacheing system, or why one Quboz song continues to play after the internet has been disconnected.

 

Eric Shim is on a different level.  He knows how it all works internally far more than Ari, me, either of you, and @The Computer Audiophile ;)

 

[The Computer Audiophile]

3 minutes ago, DancingSea said:

Eric Shim is on a different level.  He knows how it all works internally far more than Ari, me, either of you, and @The Computer Audiophile ;)

Yes, I talk to Eric frequently. He’s wonderful to work with. I will see him at Axpona and mention this topic. 

[DancingSea]

Just now, The Computer Audiophile said:

Yes, I talk to Eric frequently. He’s wonderful to work with. I will see him at Axpona and mention this topic. 

 

Super!  No one would be more thrilled than me if Quboz gets cached.  Not that I know if the caching of Quboz means anything to the sound quality.  But instead knowing that it gets cached would at minimum satisfy my emotional need for reality to comport with my beliefs 😇

[jrsub]

It will be interesting to hear what Eric says.   Based on emperical tests a Qobuz streamed track is downloaded in its entirety and retained somehow.   Could just be the track that is streamed is kept in system  memory and the SSD cache as Eric says is really just for local files, NAS, and USB.   

[DancingSea]

6 minutes ago, jrsub said:

It will be interesting to hear what Eric says.   Based on emperical tests a Qobuz streamed track is downloaded in its entirety and retained somehow.   Could just be the track that is streamed is kept in system  memory and the SSD cache as Eric says is really just for local files, NAS, and USB.   

This is the most reasonable conclusion.  It's no great shakes to buffer a single song in system memory.  It's likely locally stored files go to the same buffer, but I'm just guessing.

 

Auralic has done away with the SSD cache and instead relies entirely upon system memory for caching.