Help me pick a music server

[PaulF]

Tuckia, I'm curious, do you listen to 40s-60s jazz or other analog recordings? 

 

I ask because, as good as digital can get, on most analog recordings the vinyl is still better.  Now, my DSD128 needle-drops are so close most can't tell the difference, but commercial digital recordings of my favorites are inferior to the vinyl (though some get close, most don't, and some are pathetic).

 

I had the Luxman DAC.  It's very good.  I loved it.  I never compared it against the Vega, but my impression is that the Vega, while not as lush, is even better, in Exact mode.

 

I may get an Aurender but with all the choices buying one new now is tough.

[PaulF]

So, I bought an Aries, and will have it Thursday.  I report here on SQ vs. my Mac Mini/mRendu with the Vega.

 

Oh, I also have a multibit Gungnir coming tomorrow, so may include that in testing as well.  (Though I've always been partial to R2R DACs I don't expect it to threaten the Vega.)

[Tuckia08]

PaulF,

No to the 40's and 50's jazz. I cut my audio teeth on tubes and grooves in the 70s and 80's so my LP's range from the 60's into the 90's. Much of this is very poor SQ. My commentary is more an indictment on a lack of development in my vinyl front end. I decided in the 90's That I wasn't going to pop $20k on an "adequate" vinyl system. With vinyl's resurgence I'm curious how much buyers are spending on equipment. I'll say that cheap vinyl is far more tolerable than cheap digital, but I don't aspire to either, but I guess cost is relative. There is always something more expensive. 

There is a lot of uncertainty in offering commentary to an unfamiliar audience. After what seemed like an eternity of stagnation in digital front end development I'm pretty excited about recent developments with servers and processors. I picked up a Vega on a whim after reading some good reviews. I Fed it with a generic transport with very mediocre results. My McCormack UDP-1 deluxe still killed it. I tried my SB touch streaming from my Synology NAS. Not too good. Not very good at all. Reading lead me to the Aurender N100h over the Aries. This really completed it. My old crappy red book cd's all of a sudden popped with body, saturation and 3D imaging and way cleaner than my TT. I don't think it is perfect. I think there is more resolution and staging to be had. More money will solve that when I go to an N10 or beyond.

Anyway, I just wanted to share the good luck I had with this pairing. Not sure where you are in your journey. In my system I find the color and mid range bloom of the Luxman appealing. The Vega has more content at the frequency extremes. Curiously I couldn't hear a difference between level 4 (if I remember correctly) and exact mode. Maybe once an hour I'd get a glitch in exact so I didn't run it here.

BTW in most of the cases where I have duplicates of recordings in red book and LP I like the digital better. My very best LP's (Chesky, MFSL) which I don't have in digital still have a realism I'm not quite getting in digital yet, even hi res flac and DSD.

Best luck with the new Aries. I'm sure it will be a nice improvement.

[scan80269]

2 hours ago, PaulF said:

So, I bought an Aries, and will have it Thursday.  I report here on SQ vs. my Mac Mini/mRendu with the Vega.

 

Oh, I also have a multibit Gungnir coming tomorrow, so may include that in testing as well.  (Though I've always been partial to R2R DACs I don't expect it to threaten the Vega.)

Congratulations!  I think you will like how the Aries/Vega combo sounds.

 

A couple of comments on the Vega, if I may.

 

My Aries/Vega combo (using USB) has a tendency to suffer dropouts for a minute or two whenever I switch to playing content based on a different base sampling frequency, for example from Redbook 16/44.1K to 24/96K.  The EXACT clock mode has a very narrow locking range (in exchange for utmost SQ) so whenever the audio reference clock has to change from 22.5792MHz (44.1K multiple) to 24.576MHz (48K multiple) or vice versa, it takes a while for the lock to stabilize, thus some dropouts in the mean time.  Because of this, I've been largely avoiding playing any 48K/96K/192K content on my Vega.  In contrast, switching amongst 44.1K/88.2K/176.4K/352.8K content typically results in no dropouts.  Also, the dropout sensitivity is focused on the USB interface.  With AES/EBU or coax input, I have not heard a single dropout regardless of how I switch sampling frequencies.

 

I got even better sound from my Vega after inserting a Jensen PI-2XX balanced isolation transformer at the XLR analog outputs.  In particular, the upper treble became smoother and the sound became a bit more organic as a whole.  I suspect the Jensen acts as a low-pass filter to reduce remnant ultrasonic content from Vega from reaching the preamp (or whatever analog equipment is downstream from Vega).  How effective a Jensen transformer is may depend on how sensitive to ultrasonics the preamp is.

 

With Aries, you can try both wireless and wired (Ethernet) streaming to see which yields better SQ.  My friend and I have gone back and forth a few times, and ultimately settled on wired at 100Mbps as being the best sounding.  We tried wireless over a dedicated 5GHz radio band off the wireless router, but this was bested by a tweaked out 100Mbps Ethernet connection.

 

Plugging a USB hard disk into Aries was the most convenient option, but also the worst sounding one for us.  This is probably a case of how streaming from a NAS to Aries delivers better SQ than Lightning Server pulling music from an attached USB drive.  YMMV as usual, so it's best to experiment and make your own conclusions.