N100C vs N100H?

[2FlyingYorkies]

Looking at adding another Aurender for streaming in my new secondary system. When I purchased my current N100H, it was the only option in that portion of the lineup. Now there's also an N100SC (no internal storage, which is not useful for me), and an N100C that has a Coax output. The N100C is priced a solid 25% above the N100H, which seems like a heck of a premium for a single added output. Does anyone have experience with this model, and/or know what else is changed under the hood to warrant the higher price? Has anyone compared the coax output to the USB, and is one clearly better than the other?

 

[Mike]

No other change but the addition of the coax. It’s really designed for older DAC’s which don’t have an USB input.

 

[2FlyingYorkies]

I just found a helpful, but slightly out of date, brochure buried on Aurender's website: Aurender_Brochure_2019.pdf - Google Drive. The chart on page 5 confirms what Mike said. Looks like the H and C models are the same except for the Coax and associated clock. The C model also appears to come standard with the 4TB HDD storage drive. That explains some of the cost difference.

Interestingly, I noticed that the "SC" version, although it doesn't come with a storage drive of any kind, does have a 240GB SSD cache drive instead of the 120GB version on the H and C models. Add your own 2TB SSD for ~$250 (roughly the cost difference between the C and SC), and on paper you have a device that gets fairly close to the much more expensive N10, minus the AES/EBU and Toslink outputs. I'm sure there are plenty of other differences, but its an interesting proposition, and one that to me makes the C model less attractive if you need a coax output and are willing to do a tiny bit of DIY.