The Aurender N50 is a three-box unit weighing 106 lb. From top, server, power supply, streamer.
A streamer that costs $38,500? Why?
Last week was our 'Find Your Fyne' in-store event, and the Aurender N50 music server and streamer was half of our all-new star digital source for the $200,000 main system. The three-box streamer fed a Berkeley Audio Design Alpha Reference DAC Series 3P, a combination that is getting rave reviews from the field.
To anyone still confused about streamers (and a lot of people are), they are simply computers. Dedicated, optimized computers. Appliances, if you will. So why are they so expensive? Look up "Most expensive gaming PCs" and see how you can easily spend over $30,000 on one. Once you start tweaking, upgrading, shielding, cooling, and optimizing, things quickly get expensive.
Similarly, high-end streamers cost so much because:
- They have custom chassis, often carved from hunks of high-quality aluminum
- They have high-spec, extremely low-noise power supplies with expensive components
- All circuits, but especially key ones such as clocks, USB, and outputs use expensive parts and are carefully designed to minimize noise and latency
- There is isolation and shielding between inherently noisier parts, such as drives and screens, and signal circuits
- They use custom code that's heavily optimized to drop latency and use the least amount of processing for the task
- Listening tests are expensive, and yes, streamers (especially their power supplies) "sound" different from one another. For example, Lumin and Aurender have distinct house sounds even with their digital-only products
- And finally, they're not made in the quantities that Dell or Lenovo make PCs
Three-Box Design
The $38,500 Aurender N50 comes in three machined aluminum chassis and weighs in at 106 lb. Looking at the photo above, the top unit has all the vibrating, electrically noisy stuff: screen, front-panel controls, two 2.5" hard disk bays, USB data ports, isolated USB audio, and isolated LAN port. There are also two trigger outputs.
The middle box is a power supply with separate toroids for the server and the streamer boxes. Each transformer is vacuum-encapsulated and epoxy-filled within a polished stainless-steel enclosure.
Finally, the bottom unit is the streamer with AES, optical, two coax digital outputs, a clock input, and an I2S output. The clock input lets you connect an external clock such as the Aurender MC10 or MC20. The N50 can accept either a master clock or word clock signal. The former is a 10 MHz signal that serves as a reference for all other generated clocks. A word clock matches the sampling frequency, so it's either 44.1 kHz or 48 kHz. (The 48 kHz signal is multiplied by two or four to create the 96 kHz and 192 kHz.)
The Aurender MC20 is a master and word clock for the ultimate in digital playback realism.
"The Perfect Streamer"
Kelly Scheidt, Aurender's North America director of sales, got the first N50 in the US, and he knew he'd be fielding endless questions about how it compares with the N30SA, Aurender's $27,500 two-box streamer just below the N50. So he set up the same playlist and placed both units such that he just had to switch a digital cable to compare.
Even without any break-in, he knew that the N50 over USB sounded unlike anything he was used to. And though the N30SA is incredible, the gap between it and the N50 kept widening as the latter broke in. "When you build out," says Kelly, in the context of separate boxes in audio, "you always get gains."
Product shots aside, you should, of course, maximize the isolation offered by the N50 by placing each unit on a separate shelf and not stacking them. With the N50 properly set up and fully broken in, Kelly found that "nothing gets lost in the mix." It didn't matter whether it was a violin being plucked in the background or a cymbal hit deep in the studio, "everything is so clearly in its own space."
"To me, the N50 is the perfect streamer," says Kelly. "Everything you like about Aurender is improved."