Music and movie streaming is becoming increasingly popular at an astonishing rate.

Auralic-Aries-G1-Streamer-Qobuz-Photo-of-All-Components

Streamers and streaming services have been here a while but are really now taking hold of the music and movie delivery to consumers at home and anywhere they are located using their phones or tablets.

I have put off setting up streaming because (1) I have all my music on hard drives connected to OPPO BDP-105 and UDP-205 players, using a phone and tablet app that shows me a directory of the music which I can play by simply tapping on an album or track; and (2) I am not very proficient with manipulating my wireless network.

However, I have finally decided to “bite the bullet” and try it out.

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This preview and full article (coming shortly) represent my first try. I obtained an AURALiC ARIES G1 streamer (reviewed in November 2018 by Yongki Go). For the streaming service, I chose Qobuz because they offer streaming of high-resolution audio, up to 192/24, in lossless FLAC.

The ARIES G1 does not include a DAC. For this, I used an AURALiC VEGA, which we reviewed in 2014.

I had some trouble with the setup procedure, in large part because of my inexperience with wireless networks, but also because there were three components trying to communicate with each other wirelessly at the same time: The AURALiC ARIES G1 streamer, an iPad/iPhone app called Lightning DS which lets you interact with the Qobuz website to select music to stream, and the wireless router. This is not AURALiC’s or Qobuz’s fault. It is just something that has to be dealt with and which should improve over time as software and routers are improved. I ended up keeping the ARIES G1 and VEGA powered on constantly, just booting the iPad and Lightning DS app when I wanted to listen to streamed music.

Once I had the procedure for use down, it all worked perfectly.

A photograph of the AURALiC ARIES G1 Streamer, the AURALiC VEGA DAC, and the iPad with the Lightning DS app running is shown at the top of this page.

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For one test, I downloaded three albums to my computer from Qobuz, one in 44.1/16 and the other two in 96/24. In order to do this, it was necessary to install the Qobuz native app on my computer (this is not the Lightning DS app). I then played the albums from my hard drive and the same albums simultaneously being streamed from the Qobuz website from my computer to an OPPO HA-1 pure Class A headphone amplifier and OPPO headphones. I switched back and forth from the hard drive versions and the streamed versions. The use of the HA-1 and headphones allowed me to hear all the fine details in the music.

They sounded exactly the same, confirming my assumption that the streamed music did not lose anything through the streaming process.

I will talk more about all of this in the full article, coming shortly. This will include my comparison of high res audio to 320 Kbps MP3 audio.