auralic aries femto is comaparable with??

What are you using as a DAC with the Mac Mini/Audirvana, and are you askingbthat compared to the Auralic through the same DAC, i.e. as a different store/renderer, or do you mean using the Auralic’s Femto DAC? If the latter, it will all come down to the DAC, and how good the one is you’re using now.

Or are you using the Mac’s own internal DAC? If so you’re certainly not getting anything like the best that Mac/Audirvana are capable of! And I’d guess that yhe Femto could well be significantly better, being designed for hifi use not just general purpose computer uses.

Audirvana as a renderer on Mac Mini is better than ND5XS’s renderer to my ears, and used with a good DAC is capable of very good sound quality if fully optimised: I compared MM/A and ND5XS  as renderes into Chord Hugo DAC, and found MM/A better, and currently use it into a Chord Dave DAC, and it doesn’t shame itself. That said, if used into a susceptible DAC like Hugo, which doesn’t have galvanic isolation of its inputs, the MM needs something to provide good blocking of RF (When I had Hugo I used a Gustard U12 isolator/converter, so facilitating use of the best quality USB output and provide the necessary isolation). Whether Aurilac Femto used with an extrnal DAC would benefit from extra RF isolation I don’t know, but may well depend on the DAC.

Go for it! Its supposedly better then the mini so will be great. Dac V1 likes a Good USB cable so try a couple of those afterwards too.

Sorry, somehow overlooked your reference to V1, so ignore all I said about DACs!

I confirm ... I currently use the MM with the DAC V1.

The DAC V1 remains ... I just wanted to know if Auralic Femto could be better than MM / A as a streamer ...

In both cases I think I do not need a galvanic isolator because I use the asynchronous USB V1 that is already isolated ....

So nobody has experience about it?

Angelodipa,

I purchased a used Auralic Aries w/ Femto clocks and the dual power supply about 5 months ago.  I feed a Chord 2Qute via USB with it, and it replaced a Bluesound Node 2 that was previously connected to the 2Qute via coax.

The upgrade in quality was overwhelming, especially being someone who may have once thought "1s and 0s are all the same being sent over a cable, how hard can that be?"  I kept a file of notes (that I shared with a local friend) in my first 2 days of listening, and am just copying and pasting again what I wrote then:

Impressions:

• Greater overall dynamics
• Wider and more defined soundstage
• More detail: mid and especially highs... more decay gives instruments feeling of air around them, clarity of background vocals much easier to separate (Gillian Welch’s voice in background of Dave Rawlings Machine songs is really clear)
• Revealing previously not noticed details and rhythms
• Just more engaged!

Did not realize 2Qute had previously been underutilized

Fun to pull that much detail through the SN2 and turn that into even more fun rhythmic drive

So, at least that was my experience:  a really nice streaming upgrade.  FWIW, I use both Tidal and local NAS for high res files as sources between Node 2 and Aries, so that all stayed the same.  I did lose the first-level MQA decoding of the Node 2, but that did not offset the overall improvement of the Aries and am not looking back with any regret.

Thx thx thx kishekar!

very interesting! 

Thx for your direct experiece...

Most interesting of course would be  comparison with Audirvana on MM, if any people have done that?

auralic gear is top class plus one of the best stable apps out that  . the aries has been replaced for the new range that are get rave reviews