Morning,
I recently purchased an Aries Mini and am after some guidance from people who’ve used one.
I’ll be trialling using this both purely as a network bridge with the output via Toslink (therefore using an external DAC) and separately using the RCA outputs direct to the amp.
The main difference I think it’s going to be MQA unfolding as my external DAC doesn’t support it nor DSD.
Anyone got one of these and can share their setups?
You should set its MQA Capabilities to “No MQA Support”.
On the Roon side of things, I have audio device set to ‘No MQA Support’ and let Roon then do the first unfold by enabling ‘Enable MQA Core Decoder’.
Although the Aries Mini will resample for an external DAC, I also have Roon set to match the DAC rates (so resampling happens on Roon server).
If you have an external DAC that supports MQA then you would set Roon appropriately (renderer or full decode, depending on DAC), and under Aries Mini, set MQA passthrough to on.
thanks both.
After a bit of playing round, I think the Aries DAC is better than my external, will try the above.
It’s a really versatile little thingy!
I use mine mostly as a transport/DAC using it’s analog outs. I don’t use it’s MQA capability, rather prefer letting Roon do its first unfold. I also use it as a transport, but over USB as this seems the best fit for my DACs and media content (Quite a lot of HighRez and DSD).
What i’ve heard so far, hasn’t convinced me of the benefits of MQA but to not unfold it at all sounds worse to me, than letting Roon do it’s job. So for me the easy solution is; let Roon do what it does and obsess less! 
Unless you already are using one, a good stable linear PSU makes a rather nice difference to it’s sound quality though. This affects the analog out more than the digital ones to these ears though.