Auralic Sirius G2.1 Upsampling Processor

AURALiC introduces a category-wide update to its award-winning G2 and GX Product Range: Series G2.1/GX.1. The G2 Series now stands as one of AURALiC’s most successful projects. The effects of this effort have served as an important lesson to the team: that digitally oriented audiophiles prize above all else: sonic performance, industrial design, and diversity of features in their purchases. While the success of the G2 products proved a welcome chapter, the AURALiC team, in its innovative spirit, feels that it’s time to further the series in terms of its capabilities, both in the realm of hardware and software.

Auralic Sirius G2.1 Upsampling Processor

The G2.1 Series casework now features a double enclosure, or “chassis-within-a-chassis,” where the outer casework is manufactured from high-grade aluminum and an additional internal enclosure is made from copper. These design revisions enhance EMI shielding, providing an audible improvement to performance. A new, sculpted metal base provides a high-mass, heavyweight foundation for the G2.1 / GX.1 series, bonded to the enhanced four-foot assembly. This substantial base adds overall mass to the product and further builds on AURALiC’s modest elegance and improves the sound of the product overall.

Enhanced Suspension System

The balanced weight distribution design found internally in the original G2/GX layout remains unchanged, but a newly designed suspension spike system further isolates the product from external mechanical vibration. Potentially harmful vibrations are absorbed within the six-coiled-spring, acoustically calibrated core of each foot, with each spring tuned to a different tension point, resulting in greater sound clarity and a more open sound field through vibration damping at separate frequencies, yet again providing for enhanced sonic performance.

Circuit Optimisations

While external changes to the series are certainly welcome, internal circuitry modification couldn’t be ignored. For the ARIES G2.1, the USB output has been transformed into a more universal category of application, allowing for a broad level of compatibility across most manufacturers’ USB inputs. The HDD port, for local hard drive connectivity, has been given a power boost to handle a broad range of USB drives requiring higher power delivery. These optimizations have extended the potential feature sets of the products.

CD Playback and ripping – the latest from Lightning streaming

We couldn’t ignore the importance of additional features offered by the tried and tested Lightning OS, now in its seventh iteration. As requested by our customers, Lighting OS 7.0 will provide CD playback with optional ripping capabilities. Customers can use a CD drive connected via USB to the AURALiC product. Lightning’s CD function will read each disk sector several times to ensure ultimate data accuracy, then save to memory cache prior to playback. This makes for a completely jitter-free CD playback experience, besting other standalone CD player sat far higher prices. As for ripping, while you may already have the lion’s share of your CD collection stored on a drive or NAS of some kind, the ability to comfortably add CD albums to your library on occasion will add a welcome utility to your AURALiC setup.