Auralic Altair DAC/Streamer

[pvanosta]

@Oscar0990

Agreed! This is the kind of box I have been waiting for. If the reviews of the DAC portion position it close to the Vega (or at least much closer to the Vega than to the Mini's DAC), this could be an absolute bargain in a relatively small competitive field. I guess the nearest competitor would be the Lumin D1 (limited to DSD64) and after that there does not seem to be much out there under 5K (Simaudio 380D, Aurender A10) or higher (Nadac). This could be a game changer in this market and I await the reviews...

[pvanosta]

I was about to ask about your synology setup when I saw you were running roon on a windows 10 box...

[pvanosta]

At the moment, I use either the LightningDS app on my Ipad or the Lumin app on my Ipad (depends on how I want to browse my collection). LightningDS has an easy filter to list additions to the library by import date, which gives me fast access to new stuff. Lumin allows me to easily search by folder, which allows me to track down items where I know I filed them... In either case, I believe you should use an Ipad to browse and play.

[pvanosta]

On 6/9/2017 at 6:10 PM, cordobaman said:

New Lightning Server 5.0 is working fine on my Altair. They've addressed the library sorting issue by allowing "the" and "A" to be ignored for Artist, Album, or song. The web interface to choose options is nice. Also better support for TIDAL/MQA allowing native sampling frequency (no more limit to 44.1/48).  Sound a little different somehow, will take some listening time to pinpoint...

At the risk of coming across as a n00b, can someone please point me to a tutorial on this web interface? How do I get to it etc.? I can't easily find it on the auralic website...

Thanks

[pvanosta]

2 hours ago, cordobaman said:

 

Simply enter your Altair's IP address into a browser address bar and it takes you there.

 

To get the IP address on a Windows machine: find your Altair on the network, right-click, properties.

Thanks. That worked a treat.

[pvanosta]

Has anyone played with the 'Scheduled Rescan' feature in the Library settings of the web interface?

 

Assuming you use an Ipad to browse and access your library (like I do) and you schedule a daily rescan at 1.00 am for instance. What happens on your Ipad during the night if the App is not open ('open' means the Ipad would be on and lit as the app does not let it go to sleep)? What do you see on the Ipad the next morning if you imported new tracks the day before the nightly refresh?

 

I'm only asking because this would be a very useful feature for me, IF the Ipad data is refreshed. If I still have to run a rescan manually on my Ipad to make the new albums show up the next day, the feature is relatively useless to me at least.

[pvanosta]

In the meantime, I decided to do a little experiment. I set the scheduled rescan to 'On', set the time to 01.00 am and added a few files to the library.

This morning I launched the app on my Ipad and sure enough, after a quick 'album art refresh' pause, the new uplooads showed up.

 

Excellent! No more manual rescans of the library during the day...

[pvanosta]

4 minutes ago, Enrok said:

How much improvment do you get with altair compared to an auralic aries mini runing with an external DAC (Atoll HD 100)?

The question more precisely is would you improve the system by keeping the mini and changing the DAC or upgrading to the altair?

I think the answer is 'it depends'. How much money do you plan on spending on the new dac? The Altair dac is not quite at the level of the $2600 Vega but it gets pretty darn close. Unless you plan on spending the price of the Altair on the standalone DAC, you might not get a noticeable improvement difference over the Altair, while the Altair offers a one-box solution. Also: How big is your library?(I had to move from Mini to Altair because the mini could not handle my library size (>200,000 tracks). Your mileage may vary, as always.