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When the AURALiC ARC MX+ touched down from its trip halfway around the world spanning Beijing, Incheon, Guangzhou, Almaty, Paris, Basel and Lonay, the AFN402™ chassis—surprisingly heavy relative to its dimensions— showed off the shiny Alire™ damper which lines all three inner surfaces of the cover.


Removing the yellow cover over the PurePower™ filter revealed an FN402 Schaffner module, two small caps and a few additional parts.



The mother board shows an absolute minimum of flying leads to instead champion very cleanly executed surface-mount technology.


Whilst AURALiC is a newer operation, this machine's build quality outside and in wouldn't let on.


"We use test gear based on National Instruments's DAQ devices and a series of custom-built analog signal generators for a solution that's equivalent to what Miller Audio Research offers. We prefer NI's DAQ hardware because it offers highly flexible programming functions via LabView. This proved useful to our special research and testing projects and helped us improve our mathematical models between subjective auditory impressions and objective testing data. Our set of test gear of course also supports all the common measurement parameters like...


"... HF intermodulation distortion, above shown on the ARK MX+'s single-ended output. The output level is at 0dBFS, the load is 600 ohms. This test result is the same at all sampling rates.


"Here is a J-test scope of the ARK MX+'s analog output signal at 11.025kHz, -6dBFS, sampled at 44.1kHz with the least significant bit toggled at 229Hz and 16-bit data sourced at the USB port."


In OS X Snow Leopard, AudioMIDI instantly identified the device as 6-channel 24-bit ARK MX+ and passed sound in PureMusic 8.2. Whilst 'native integer format support' proved selectable, it caused instant distortion as though the sound passed through a mostly opaque filter. Disabling this selection returned the sound to normal.


As Xuanqian had explained, Apple's protocol allows for neither 3rd-party USB Audio driver installations—FireWire is a different matter—nor are more complex USB transfer schemes supported as the more open-ended Windows platforms provide for. Do it Apple's way or not at all is the clear implication.

For Windows users AURALiC's control panel offers auto/manual sample rate selection, internal/external clock source and adjustable stream buffer, ASIO buffer and WDM sound buffer depths. In use the chunky front-panel knob acts as power switch. Operational status is confirmed with a red LED that's embedded in the cosmetic groove. Sample rate changes in source software elicit an audible relay click and the LED flashes. Because the designers implemented fixed upsampling to 176.4kHz or 192kHz respectively, the lack of visual sample rate processing information is academic. As long as you know whether your music file is based on the 44.1kHz or 48kHz family of frequencies, you know that you'll be listening to the highest integer multiple thereof. Digital input selection occurs automatically via signal sensing. Hence only the S/PDIF or USB input may be connected at any given time. Because both RCA and XLR outputs are individually buffered they can be used simultaneously (the balanced output voltage is twice as high however).

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