Burbank, Calif. — Aurender will go to next week’s High End Show in Munich, Germany, to extend its line of high-resolution audio (HRA) music servers to a lower opening price of $2,499.
The new server/player will be available in May and will join Aurender servers ranging from $3,499 to $17,600.
The new device will come in two versions. The $2,699 N100H player/server will feature 2TB internal storage and a 120GB solid-state-drive (SSD) for caching playback. The N100 at $2,499 will feature a 120GB SSD for caching playback but no internal hard drive.
The N100H server/player plays music stored on its internal drive and from an external network-attached-storage (NAS) device or USB hard drive. With SSD cached playback of music stored on the internal drive, NAS drive or USB-attached drive, the server is said to eliminate noise, jitter and vibration and greatly reduce wear and tear on the main storage drives.
Like other Aurender servers, it features a machined-aluminum chassis that includes a 3-inch AMOLED display that displays information such as artist name and song title or source level meters in a choice of two color schemes.
The N100H also acts as a companion to the matching machined-aluminum Aurender X725 DAC/amplifier, enabling users to add a pair of speakers to listen to stored music libraries.
Users control the server via the Aurender Conductor app for iPad or a new Android app. The playlist-based apps let users view their library by song, artist, album, genre, composer, conductor or folder. Users can also filter these results by genre, favorites and by file resolution, including DSD and 16- or 24-bit PCM.
The app also accesses Tidal, the CD-quality streaming-music service, for playback through the player/server.
Like Aurender’s other music servers, the N100H comes with remote Internet technical support. Users send a remote support request through the Conductor app, and engineers diagnose and fix problems over the Internet.
Aurender is the brand name of the smart audio division of TV Logic of South Korea. Aurender is known for high-resolution music servers but also sells a headphone DAC/amp and a Cast-Fi 7. That is a tabletop stereo speaker with 7-inch color LCD screen to display video from such HDMI sources as the Chromecast, Roku & Amazon Fire TV dongles and other HDMI sources.
