THE AURENDER X100L MUSIC STORAGE & PLAYER

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Allison Wiggins
5 years ago
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1 THE AURENDER X100L MUSIC STORAGE & PLAYER Playback was smooth and compared with the Audivarna Plus setup with my Mac Air, the Aurender X100L executed with darker background and presented a cleaner sonic delivery which is very distinctive during the review. Introduction In my pursuit of analogue setup, I had a period of time having trouble finding albums that I sought for. Searching high and low from Amazon, ebay to Discogs.com, but failed to find any. The chances are

2 that some of them may never occured in vinyl production in the first place, or in limited copies that collectors are not letting go at any price. That made me decided to hop onboard of the digital music journey, as a complement to complete my music collection. And that was how I came across the amazing products from Aurender. Aurender was developed by a Korea company named WideaLab that was founded by Harry Lee. His company was later acquired by a public listed company called TV Logic. With more fund injected, the Aurender team was able to acquire resources to design and build their custom servers around its own boards rather than using the commercially available one. And today, they are not just builder of great music servers, but also streamers, amplifiers, portable players that had won respects in the audiophile community. In this review, the subject is the highly sought model among their music storage series, the Aurender X100. I got the X100L version, which comes with higher HDD capacity compared to the standard model. The Aurender X100L The Aurender X100L is built with a very nice chassis with fins of heat sink recessed beautifully at its sides. The X100L is an elongated version compared with the standard model with a shorter depth. The additional space was used to house multiple HDDs and beefing it up to a hefty 6TB or 12TB of music storage space depending on your configurations. On its front, it had a standby/on button that will illuminate a nice blue glow when being pressed. Then follow by its big 3.3 inches AMOLED screen that display various system information and Meta data of the music listed in the storage. The rest of 4 buttons are used for controlling the menu and playback/forward/backward selections. On holding the menu button for a couple of seconds, it will show you the system information that some will require for initial setup. On its rear, the Aurender X100L consisted of a simple power on off switch and 3 numbers of USB2.0 connections for audio out to DAC and connecting to external NAS devices. Things to note is that this X100 series only come with USB output, meaning that your DAC can only connect to this with an USB connection. If you wanted more options of connectivity, you will need to choose their higher series S10 or W20.

3 On the HDD section, the Aurender X100L uses a unit of 120GB solid-state HDD for playback purpose. What it does is that after you had selected the music for play back, it will copy the selected music from the 6TB HDD and put them on the 120GB SSD. The advantage of using SSD for playback is to reduce the effect of mechanical parts from conventional HDD that might affect the data reading process. The Aurender also consisted of a Gigabit LAN port, which is important as it connects up your network to provide the access and interaction from your mobile Aurender apps. The Setup In general, current digital music format can be divided into two major camp, the PCM (Pulse code modulation) and the DSD (Direct Stream Digital). In my review of the Aurender X100L, it came with various copies of DSD64 / DSD128 / PCM for my testing, with courtesy from my friend that spent days transferring his collections over to my unit. The Aurender was connected directly to MSB Analog DAC as well as Oppo HA-1 DAC/Amp. The music output was tested on both of my HiFi Stereo setup and Headphone setup. One of the most crucial part is that you need to have a tablet to serve as a command control for your Aurender operation. Aurender don t recognize iphone as remote device and thus you need to get something bigger for that. Make sense to me anyway since you need the ample space to browse your catalog and view the meta data of the album. Connecting the tablet with the Aurender is a breeze, but if in any case that you got into trouble with it, you can just click on the support function on the Aurender applications and an will be routed to the backend support with details extracted from your device. Personally I encountered a few issues and the support was fast. They were able to access the device remotely to remedy the problems, which is a plus point for non technical consumers. Another important aspect that you may need to note is the compatibility of the DAC with Aurender. I had tried connecting the Antelope Zodiac Platinum DAC to it but they don't synchronise at all. After some checks with the support, I was informed that the Antelope DACs were not on their interface list. Perhaps at this point of writing, the problem might have already being resolved but I can t verify further as the review units were all being returned.

Playback was smooth and compared with the Audivarna Plus setup with my Mac Air, the Aurender X100L executed with darker background and presented a cleaner sonic delivery which is very distinctive

4 Playback was smooth and compared with the Audivarna Plus setup with my Mac Air, the Aurender X100L executed with darker background and presented a cleaner sonic delivery which is very distinctive during the listen. Complex passages from orchestra and dynamic tracks were delivered effortlessly with better detail retrieval. A simply layman description would be like removing a veil from the sound source. I was able to listen better in depth and pinpointing of instruments was not a guessing game anymore. Aside from the clean and clear sound reproduction from Aurender, the major plus point of the setup is the ease of usage and its highly intuitive user interface. The apps make the feel and reach of your music a bliss and was an enjoyment to do so. During my review duration, I can t help admiring the ease of use and the marvelous graphical interface that comes with very good level of orientation. There are several tweaks and improvement that can be made on the Aurender X100L to further improvise the sonic performance. On one route is to remove the internal power section and replace it with an external Linear Power Supply unit. Many vendors from Singapore and Hong Kong are providing such modification services. I had heard a modified set in my friend s place and the sound improvement was significant. Soundstage was bigger and background quieter, bringing out more fine nuances from the music playback.

Summary / Conclusion: The trend of digital music playback is getting more matured and with HDDs getting cheaper, digital music portability and streaming is becoming affordable and highly convenient

5 Summary / Conclusion: The trend of digital music playback is getting more matured and with HDDs getting cheaper, digital music portability and streaming is becoming affordable and highly convenient to use. With the recent popularity of cloud streaming and backing from Telco selling it as a service, cloud streaming maybe another level that we all need to be paying attention to. As of now, music storage and playback from Aurender triumphed in this area and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend you to have a set to improve your digital playback experiences. Pros: Amazing user interface from the Aurender Apps Quiet background presentation Superb backend support Cons: Price is on the high side The device generate quite an amount of heat Not all DAC is compatible

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