Sidebar 3: Measurements
With a media server like the Aurender N10, there's not much that can be assessed on the test bench. However, I did look at the properties of the N10's AES/EBU output, using a 45'-long cable to connect the N10 in the listening room to my Audio Precision SYS2722 in the test lab. Even so, with the N10 playing 24-bit J-Test data sampled at 44.1kHz, the jitter in the AES/EBU datastream was very low, at 293.3 picoseconds (average value over a 700Hz–100kHz bandwidth). The eye pattern (fig.1) was wide open, as it should be.
Fig.1 Aurender N10, AES/EBU output, eye pattern with 44.1kHz J-Test data. (50ns/horizontal div.).
All 24 bits were active in the digital outputs with 24-bit PCM files and transcoded DSD files. However, there was one peculiarity with DSD: The Aurender app offers the user the choice of transcoding DSD files either to 88.2kHz-sampled PCM or to 176.4kHz PCM, but no matter which I selected, I always got a 24-bit PCM stream sampled at 176.4kHz.—John Atkinson
