Anyone own the Aurender N10 music server?

[clpetersen]

Originally Posted by jdandy

bigblue.......I am relatively confident music servers, computer based network and NAS servers will still be here for years to come. The demand for music servers is growing. Music servers already have a history of success that spans approximately 15 years or so. The concept of server based music delivery is certainly not a flash in the pan. In my opinion, there is nothing I see in the pipeline, including streaming from subscription based Internet servers, that is likely to make personal music servers disappear from many audiophile's sound systems anywhere in the near future.

You are correct that music server values on the used market will drop. ....

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I agree with both posts. As a former owner of the Olive 06HD music server, the hot toy of its era (lets say 5 years in the distant past), I definitely consider investments in digital media players as 'throw-away money' - be prepared to walk away and get the newer versions.

But there are things I would look at, given the similarities between the Olive and Aurender.

1) Quality of the software and app - Olive's was clunky at best; it does seem that Aurender is getting very good reviews here.

2) Caching - Olive did minimal caching, which brings up:

3) Hard Drive noise - this was surprising and disappointing with the Olive. I replaced the original 3.5 inch drive with a 2.5 inch notebook drive, inside yet another enclosure (2.5 to 3.5 adaptor) to eliminate hard drive noise. Maybe the Aurender has solved this.

4) Interfacing with Streaming Sources - namely Tidal, Spotify, Apple, Google, maybe others. Again, Olive came up short.
Aurender seems to do Tidal only, which is good, but minimal. I believe this is becoming as important as the local library.

So, I would personally keep my music on a NAS (for many reasons) and use a good caching music server. Obviously the Aurender running AMM qualifies. It was nice having the library on the Olive for a self-contained solution, but I needed a good network to get the music there in the first place, so...