I’ve been thoroughly enjoying the sound of my Ian Canada Transport Pi. Currently, it’s housed in a case, but the cable management is a bit inconvenient with wires on the sides and at the back. It’s not the most aesthetically pleasing setup either. I’m considering upgrading and have my eye on the Lumin U2 and the Auralic Aries.
Here’s the setup: My DAC is a Metrum Octave II, and I couldn’t be happier with it. It played a significant role in helping me transition away from vinyl, and the sound quality is fantastic.
I’m curious if anyone has experience with the Lumin U2 or the Auralic Aries and could share their thoughts. Do you think I would see an improvement in sound quality by making the switch? Any insights or recommendations would be greatly appreciated.
Caviat: I have no experience with the Ian Canada Transport Pi, The Auralic Aries, the Lumin U2 or the Metrum Octave II so what I saying is based upon fundamental principles.
Assuming that the Metrum Octave II DAC is well architected, there may well be many reasons to upgrade to either the Auralic Aries or the Lumin U2 but I don’t think that an improvement in audio quality will be a significant one. Aethetics and convienience should likely drive the descision much more.
You don’t state what connection you are using between the Transport Pi and the DAC but looking at the Metrum Octave II DAC, is appears to only support SPDIF over COAX or TOSLINK so you cannot be using an HDMI interconnect.
This being the case, then there are only two ways that the audio quality can be affected (assuming interconnect cables are specification compliant):
Timing Jitter - SPDIF is a source clocked protocol so a basic DAC may use the SPDIF sample timing directly and thus a poorly timed source could affect audio quality. This is not the norm these days as most DACs do some kind of sample re-timing.
Ground interference (SPDIF over COAX only). Because the two devices are connected with a ground signal, it is posible for ground related issues to be incurred.
Your Ian Canada Transport Pi already claims to be low jitter and, if that is the case, even if the Auralic or Aries are even better in this respect, you may be unlikely to hear the difference - especially if your DAC does any kind of re-clocking (which most do these days) - because, like everything else, beyond a certain point jitter reduction is inaudible.
If you use TOSLINK to connect to your DAC you already have good galvanic isolation and the Transport Pi will not be contribiting to ground noise or, indeed, causing ground loops.
With SPDIF over COAX, it is possible to get issues with either ground induced noise or ground loops if the DAC does nothing to mitigate these issues. However, there are many possible mitigation strategies that DAC designers can employ. Galvanic isolators being just one of them. So again, your would expect such problems to be minimal with a well designed DAC.