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Auralic Aries Mini


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10 hours ago, misterdog said:

So if I add an internal SSD to house my library how could I add new files to it ?

Is it possible to copy from USB ?

 

As an aside I have just swapped from Hypex N-Cores  to some DIY, class A/B amps with a whole new leap in SQ. into my Quad 989 ESL's.

You can copy files over the air from a computer to the internal hdd. The Aries should show up under networks (pc). Also possible by connecting an external drive via sub, but it will copy all files on the external drive music or otherwise. You can't pick and choose.

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1 hour ago, Fridolin said:

But this is painfully slow!

Unfortunately, yes. What I do is add albums a few at a time, the ones I like the most.(I have a 4tb library of hi res on an external drive and a 500 gb internal ssd drive in the mini). Another way would be to add 500 gigs worth of your favourite music to an external drive (with nothing else on it) and copy the entire contents over via usb. You can also delete unwanted files ota from the computer.

Hey its an all in one 500$ streaming solution and although not perfect, pretty good at what it does!

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Many thanks for the replies, I currently use an external USB drive and am just weighing up the pros and cons of adding an internal SSD. Adding files from USB sounds like the best option.

 

The Aries mini is  a fabulous piece of kit, though in an ideal world control from a PC app akin to JRiver would be the ideal solution for me.  

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1 hour ago, misterdog said:

Many thanks for the replies, I currently use an external USB drive and am just weighing up the pros and cons of adding an internal SSD. Adding files from USB sounds like the best option.

 

The Aries mini is  a fabulous piece of kit, though in an ideal world control from a PC app akin to JRiver would be the ideal solution for me.  

You will find that an internal ssd drive is an improvement in sound over an external spinning drive.Plugging in an audioquest usb filter in one of the usb ports gives audible improvements as well. I am quite happy with the latest upgrade to the lightning app although I have used bubble upnp and lumin in the past. As far as I remember you can also configure jriver to work with the mini but I'm not too sure.

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1 hour ago, misterdog said:

The Aries mini is  a fabulous piece of kit, though in an ideal world control from a PC app akin to JRiver would be the ideal solution for me.  

I believe this is coming very soon in the form of a web based interface (not an app per se), which will also appeal to android and windows users. 

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  • 1 month later...

I have a problem with my Auralic mini. I use it for 1.5 years now. There is a clicking sound which comes from device. This started before 1 month ago. The click sound doesnt come from speakers directly from the mini. The mini is plugged to my dac through usb cable and i use sbooster 15v power supply with my mini.

Anybody faced same issue here?

It is really disturbing...

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still really enjoying my Mini [with SBooster]  both from its DAC output and as a streamer into my BMC Puredac...

 

my only problem is the slight static I hear on the speakers when I use the Mini's internal DAC...could this be something to do with the external HD drive attached to it ?

 

I have tried changing cables etc...no difference

Auralic Aries Femto > Yulong DA8 Hoer-Wege mods > KEF LS50W, [iSine 10,  Denon D7200] 
Desktop - Adam Artist 5 and Sub 8

 

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For those of you interested in taking the mini off the grid and making a significant improvement, get yourselves a ravpower extreme series power bank. Right now I've got it feeding 16v to the mini, and 5v each to an AMI music ds5 and ifi spdif purifier with excellent results.

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14 hours ago, Luvdac said:

Try changing over from usb to coaxial or optical. Also try a different power supply. Worth a shot to narrow down the cause of the problem.

Thanks for the reply. I will test these and try to find the root cause.

Hope i can find it.

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Hello,

 

I need some help with my Aries Mini - I have googled the problem to death and I can't find anyone with the same issue and nothing on Auralic's support page. I'm hoping that someone here can help before I throw my Mini out of the window. Apologies if this has been discussed before...

 

I have my Mini connected via Wi Fi to a Netgear R7000 on a 5Ghz network - as recommended by Auralic.  In turn, my music library is on a network folder on my macbook pro also connected to 5ghz.  When I play normal 44.1 16 bit tracks the mini works flawlessly, but when I try to play a higher quality FLAC (24 /96) or DSD the sound either stops completely or has multiple dropouts and glitches.  If i try to go back to a 16 bit file, the glitches continue. I am using the regular RCA outputs.

 

I cannot fathom what the issue is - I have tried a wired connection too and it doesn't help.  Has anyone has a similar experience? I'm new to streaming and this is very disheartening.

 

I'm hoping one of you kind folks can help.

 

Thank you for reading

 

 

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Lion Tamer - get in touch with Aries support. I'm assuming you're in the US, and the guy who I've dealt with there is really good at problem solving, and very nice. I had a number of problems with my mini, a couple of which have resulted in new firmware updates. (the problem I was having was that the mini would lose its connection if it wasn't used every day, and i'd have to take it all the way back to a factory reset. that's been fixed in recent firmware. also had problems with it playing nice with my remote library which is running on a windows server, which now works fine with DLNA. I now use the mini just as a UPnP endpoint - I wasn't much in love with the Lightning software interface.)

 

I'm running mine on the 5ghz channels in my home, and pretty far away so the signal strength isn't awesome, but I'm not having dropouts or anything like that playing 24/192 and DSD up to 2x. (I don't own any DSD over that.)  I think I've even listened to 32/384 on WIFI. 

 

First thing I'd try is to update firmware.  On both the Mini, and your router. I also have a relatively modern Netgear wireless router, and suffered through some miserable problems until the third firmware upgrade.

 

Next, go in your wireless router and work with the priorities or quota settings, telling the router to prioritize music and video. also suggest turning off dynamic QoS. It's a lovely idea but in my experience doesn't work so well.  Caused problems for me with video streaming, and with wireless music streaming to other endpoints before I got the mini. Not every device tolerates getting moved from one channel to another, or to being throttled up and down.  I also chose to use a fixed IP address more out of an abundance of caution than anything else.

 

But, get to Aries tech support - there's a "submit a request" form you can use. 

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Thank you for the reply ednaz- I have a feeling it's to do with either a router setting or possibly firmware.  I have fired off an email to Auralic support - I am in the UK but I guess that shouldn't matter.  Thank you for the advice about QoS - I will have a look into the settings.  I think the firmware on both is up to date (excluding Beta) but I will check.

 

Thank you for your help - fingers crossed Auralic will get to the bottom of it. I'll report back, hopefully my experience can help someone else.

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I just remembered that when Stereophile tested the Altair, they had all kinds of network issues at setup. When they abandoned using Lightning DS and made it a Roon endpoint, everything was sunny and calm. Another person commented the same thing on the review, and went to using the Altair as an endpoint. Those pieces of info, plus my familiarity and happiness with using JRiver and JRemote for a few years (and fewer things to learn means more listening to music) led me to similarly abandon Lightning DS. If you can try it as just an endpoint, not using Lightning DS, may be something there.

 

Also - I can see the Mini on my home network as a network attached device. When I attached a USB hard drive to it, I could see the directories. I was also able to move files from my main server to the hard drive. If you can't find your network gremlins, that might be another approach. The tech guy at Auralic said he prefers how the Mini sounds when playing music from a USB hard drive, which is why I have done some experiments.

 

Worth trying to solve. I think the mini punches way above its weight in performance. It's not as good as my Exasound DAC... but I could buy six Minis for the same price. (and if you don't have the linear power supply option, put that on your holiday gift list. I did A/B between the linear supply and the regular one, figuring I'd sent the linear back for refund if it didn't matter. It really does matter.)

 

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Yes, could well  be a Lightning DS issue - i have found it to be fairly unstable on my Ipad.  The problem is that I don't want to have to pay out more money for a Roon sub etc.  I don't really have much experience with all this - I am far from a technophobe, but all I wanted to do was buy a streamer and have it stream. If the software is not doing its job, then that is a major issue.  I have tried files direct from USB and from the internal HDD with the same results.  I daresay there is a fix, but I can't figure it out. 

 

Hopefully Auralic will get back to me, everything will work out and i'll celebrate by buying a Linear PSU! I do love the sound from the mini when it works. Thanks for all your help and advice.

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6 hours ago, Lion Tamer said:

Hello,

 

I need some help with my Aries Mini - I have googled the problem to death and I can't find anyone with the same issue and nothing on Auralic's support page. I'm hoping that someone here can help before I throw my Mini out of the window. Apologies if this has been discussed before...

 

I have my Mini connected via Wi Fi to a Netgear R7000 on a 5Ghz network - as recommended by Auralic.  In turn, my music library is on a network folder on my macbook pro also connected to 5ghz.  When I play normal 44.1 16 bit tracks the mini works flawlessly, but when I try to play a higher quality FLAC (24 /96) or DSD the sound either stops completely or has multiple dropouts and glitches.  If i try to go back to a 16 bit file, the glitches continue. I am using the regular RCA outputs.

 

I cannot fathom what the issue is - I have tried a wired connection too and it doesn't help.  Has anyone has a similar experience? I'm new to streaming and this is very disheartening.

 

I'm hoping one of you kind folks can help.

 

Thank you for reading

 

 

I'd suggest keeping the mini on a wired connection while you try to resolve this. My gut suspicion is a problem using your Mac as a file server. I'd suggest loading some hiz rez files on a USB stick locally attached to the Aries mini or a drive inside the mini to test see if the problem goes away with the Mac out of the picture. Can't say that I ever had a like stuttering problem using a PC or NAS with an Aries mini unless the wifi connection was poor.,

Regards,

Dave

 

Audio system

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4 hours ago, Lion Tamer said:

Yes, could well  be a Lightning DS issue - i have found it to be fairly unstable on my Ipad.  The problem is that I don't want to have to pay out more money for a Roon sub etc.  I don't really have much experience with all this - I am far from a technophobe, but all I wanted to do was buy a streamer and have it stream. If the software is not doing its job, then that is a major issue.  I have tried files direct from USB and from the internal HDD with the same results.  I daresay there is a fix, but I can't figure it out. 

 

Hopefully Auralic will get back to me, everything will work out and i'll celebrate by buying a Linear PSU! I do love the sound from the mini when it works. Thanks for all your help and advice.

JRiver is cheap and as easy to use as iTunes. A decade or more of development and debugging across multiple platforms. Roon is expensive, and I didn't find it terribly engaging. JRiver is about streaming to any target, not about a proprietary platform.

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53 minutes ago, ednaz said:

JRiver is cheap and as easy to use as iTunes. A decade or more of development and debugging across multiple platforms. Roon is expensive, and I didn't find it terribly engaging. JRiver is about streaming to any target, not about a proprietary platform.

Some of us prefer good over cheap...

Regards,

Dave

 

Audio system

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8 hours ago, davide256 said:

I'd suggest keeping the mini on a wired connection while you try to resolve this. My gut suspicion is a problem using your Mac as a file server. I'd suggest loading some hiz rez files on a USB stick locally attached to the Aries mini or a drive inside the mini to test see if the problem goes away with the Mac out of the picture. Can't say that I ever had a like stuttering problem using a PC or NAS with an Aries mini unless the wifi connection was poor.,

Thanks for the reply. I have tried wired connection and hi-res on a usb and internal HDD.  Same thing occurs.  My wi-fi is definitely good enough it had no problem wih hd movies etc etc and the speedtest is solid.  Can't fathom what the problem is. 

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