[edkoz]

Originally Posted by jdandy

soastrup.......I agree with your view of the Aurender A10 review in Stereophile by Jason Serinus. First, I don't particularly care for his writing style or his selection of music for this review. Right from the beginning of the A10 review he made disparaging comments that seemed to belittle the A10 streamer/DAC in a back handed manner, making fun of Aurender's claim the A10 is a high-performance component. He continued by stating the 4TB hard drive was limited storage. A 4TB hard drive stores an enormous number of FLAC encoded music files. He makes the statement that during the time the hard drive is caching files to the solid state drive for playback ultimate sound quality is sacrificed. He must have bat ears because that has not been my experience at all with either my Aurender N10 or N100H music servers, and I highly doubt it is with the A10. Jason spoke less than flatteringly about the sound of the A10's DAC. Again, I suspect he might have wanted the A10 to sound like the dCS Scarlatti he kept mentioning, a DAC system that comes in at five times the price of the Aurender A10. The A10's AKM 4490 DACs are not slouches. In addition, Jason wasn't sharp enough not to place the A10 directly on the dCS components which negatively impacted the sound of the A10 until he wised up and relocated the A10 to it's own shelf. At the same time he admitted to breaking in new cables. Hmm! More with the negative tone, he referred to the Aurender A10 online manual as far too slim. I don't know about other Aurender owners, but I have had no issues finding operating and technical information for my Aurender components and the Conductor App online, not to mention nearly immediate email response from Aurender Tech support when needed. He goes on to complain that when he selects a title of music to play, then taps Play Now in the Conductor App the music starts immediately. What the heck does he think "Play Now" means. None of this strikes me as someone who was committed in a positive way to the A10 review.

Despite the MQA filter issue discovered by John Atkinson while bench testing the A10, which if not already resolved will certainly be so in short order, Jason Victor Serinus as he seems to like to be addressed, seems to take himself more seriously than he takes his job as a reviewer in my opinion. His effort at reviewing the Aurender A10 was a lackluster, uninspired read. Jason kept referring to the A10's apparent lack of color saturation. What the heck is that supposed to mean? Perhaps chartreuse was overshadowing magenta, while a light mauve seemed pale compared to the hot pink.

Jason just couldn't resist himself. His uninspired Aurender A10 review was wrapped up with a final dig, "Those who tend to listen to music while multitasking (read: not paying attention to the music) or who don't spend hours on end sitting undisturbed in the sweet spot (read: not interested in fully enjoying music) need not hesitate."

Note: The comments in parentheses are mine.

Right on Dan