Aurender N200

As supplied, the Aurender N200 has no storage capacity aside from the 240GB NVMe SSD used for caching music for playback. Instead, two slots on the rear take 2.5in HDDs or SSDs, installed by the user to suit their needs.

And that's a good thing for two reasons: one is that you can buy your own drives at sensible prices, and the other is that Aurender has made it simple to install the storage.

The N200 has no built-in digital-to-analogue conversion, and so needs to be hooked up with either a suitable DAC - it has outputs on USB and coaxial S/PDIF or an amp/preamp with onboard conversion. And while it comes with a simple quartet of front-panel controls, operation via the Aurender Conductor app is much slicker. The player is built around the principle of caching music on its way to the output, using its internal SSD to avoid any glitches or drop-outs whether playing from internal hard-drives, external USB storage or online services such as Qobuz and Tidal, both of which are supported.

Sound quality