Auralic made a wide appeal at AXPONA 2018. The 1st floor room had space, an audience and plenty of hot tech to go around. The offerings were diversified in an interesting way as well, for the room housed 3 entirely separate listening systems from reference to compact.
While Auralic hasn’t really made a statement for the budget end of audiophillia, the Polaris All-In-One ($3k) pushing a pair of Ryan Speakers R610 Bookshelves certainly could find itself on many a music lovers shelf with its meager footprint and kitchen sink, jack-of-all-trades approach.
In yet another option, Auralic’s Xuanqian Wang was showing off the Altair Streamer ($1,899) plugged straight into the class D 400W Merak monos pushing the R620 Ryan Floorstanders ($3,500). In this case of course, the Altair is acting as both a source and pre amp with a whole host of digital playback options including Tidal streaming services, external hard drive connectivity and even optional local storage – all up for curation via Auralic’s Lighting DS control app.
The reference system at the far end of the room utilized both the G2 series Vega DAC ($5.6k) and Aries Streamer (3,899) we got a glimpse of last year, but now also offered a sneak peek window into a new master clock called LEO. The new clocker is actually referred to as the LEO GX, and will be compatible with generations beyond just 2.0 featured here. The price on the reference unit should be revealed shortly, but the piece on display at AXPONA was in full working order within the rig – attached directly to the VEGA and then on to 6 Merak mono blocks. The output pushed two svelte-sounding YG Acoustics Sonja 2.2 loudspeakers ($76.8k) for a listening experience that was both natural, dynamic and controlled.
Xuanqian took the time to break down the whole system for us on video, you can see it all from the mind who created it in the embed below.
