The Auralic facebook page is fascinating. I acknowledge its one side of the story but as someone who has previously excoriated Auralic for the way the mini was released im just having a hard time seeing Meridian’s defense.
Q: How come that this was discovered this late in the process? Pretty awkward and unfortunate decision if you ask me. Something must have gone terribly wrong here…
AURALiC: They never check the unit until CES setup then found the ARIES does not come with DAC inside
Um what? Does Meridian really operate in that much of a vacuum that the most popular device for what it is is really unknown to them? Do the agreements no mention anything about requirements? That is an astounding statement.
Q: At this point I don’t really care about MQA unless DAC’s without MQA are suddenly going to become obsolete. I hope this won’t delay the updates to firmware and Lightning DS as the other benefits promised in these updates are of much more interest to me.
AURALiC: Firmware and Lightning DS won’t be delayed, all we need is to remove them from firmware.
There are a couple of software ecosystems i can think of where this version would “accidentally” be leaked.
Q: This is unfortunate! It’s digital processing, what difference does it make if it’s performed in the DAC or in the stream receiver?
AURALiC: Because they want to ‘measure and fine tune’ the filter for each DAC to get MQA certificated. I assume they want all DAC to be sound similar, a Meridian sound?