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A month past promised delivery, I checked with Juan. "We had problems with our case supplier and rejected the last batch which delayed production. For your piece we had to modify the motherboard to support the touch screen and the Theatre View GUI of the J.River player." By the end of July, he confirmed imminent shipping. By then his Swiss importer Fritz was traveling to B&W UK before going on his vacation. Hence the machine would ship directly to me. Juan reminded me again that I "wouldn't review the standard aria we usually sell. Whilst the hardware is the same, the software is not. We modified it to avoid Wifi and the iPad app. We then included a touch monitor and a remote to control it. The GUI is J.River's Theater View which lacks some features of our iPad app. We'll send you a custom guide and Fritz will contact you to help with how to connect it, import music etc."

If that sounds like DigiBit rather went a few extra miles to accommodate a personal request which everyone else had turned down with a dismissive can't be done, I'd wholeheartedly agree. For team DigiBit, it'd have been much easier to say no like everyone else. It was very much to their credit to think out of the box and tweak their stock recipe. Likely it was also to their benefit if other clients wanted a hard-wired option once word spread of that alternative.

Via a standard VGA cable with custom tail to fit the other end pin-converted into DigitBit's service port plus a standard USB cable, the connection between aria and iiyama ProLite T225OMTS touch monitor established the GUI connection. An IR receiver dongle hanging off the aria's second USB port created a path for the included Conceptronic C08-270 wand. This added basic remote-control functions like next/last, play/pause and hands-off navigation of JRiver's Theater View.


Anyone used to an iPad's Retina display or even simple mouse would of course step back in time and way down in sophistication. Interacting with a lower-tech touch-screen monitor for basic setup tasks like adjusting screen resolution or even just closing or scaling various windows with a finger-moved pointer was downright primitive by contrast*. A standard keyboard and mouse monitor setup would reset the interface timeline to current again; and would be absolutely mandatory to surf the web to buy new music since this setup lacked a virtual keyboard to type in URLs. Being used to iTunes 10 for music-library navigation, my first encounter with J.River also clocked in lower on intuitiveness. But to be fair to any OS change, one must account for the initial learning curve before making definitive statements about which is superior.
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* "It seems I made a mistake telling Pablo to install MC19 from JRiver the day before shipping your special aria. The aria I tested a few days earlier still had the previous MC18 version and was pre-configured to automatically open in Theatre View which works perfectly with the touch monitor and remote we sent you (no need for keyboard or mouse although you can connect them to any of the USB ports). The MC19 version works okay with the iPad app but the pre-configuration we did for you was not there, hence you had to open JRiver manually whose default is the regular standard view."

The aria's AES/EBU output leashed to my customary Metrum Hex via the same short link of 110Ω van den Hul Pro which usually connects it to my SOtM USB bridge off my iMac. Ripping a few CDs to the aria's SSD—out of four initial albums, two didn't get cover art**, one encountered a read error on the third track and spit out the CD before completing the rip—plus finding a number of pre-loaded albums, I was ready to listen. My first impressions were dismissive. The sound was pale, flat and whitish. It reminded me of comparing, over a speaker system, an iPod's analog output through its 3.5mm headfi port to a digitally docked iPod with a superior DAC to bypass Apple's mobile-centric output stage.
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** "The only possible reason which could cause ripping issues is if you ripped using the 'Rip CD' command in JRiver's regular view instead of our automatic custom dBpoweramp ripper." That's indeed how I'd done it at first. 'Rip CD' seemed like the intuitive way to do it but wasn't.

Listening to the same albums over my iMac left no doubt. Not only did the aria fail to exceed it, it came in well below. Did I have to make initial sound-improvement adjustments in J.River as one does with PureMusic behind iTunes? That seemed unlikely. You'd expect all that optimized upon delivery. Juan had left me in the hands of Daniel Gil for help with migrating my iTunes library to the aria.


"We’re in negotiations with Qobuz for integration inside our iPad app. We're also adding a new feature with our next release to stream any content available in the iPad (Qobuz, Deezer, Spotify, internet radio etc) to the aria server. If you want to try a DSD file, let us know your USB DAC. We’d have to download the Win 2.0 driver for it and install it in the aria. We can do that remotely. This is another flexibility we offer to not force users to use any 3rd-party DACs." With that, Juan signed off to go on holidays. Fritz and Daniel stood by for further remote assistance. I felt amusedly reminded that Windows users rely on driver installs for anything above 24/96. As a Mac-for-music man, it's not something I usually must consider.

Removing just two bolts on the aria's rear panel, then pushing the cover forward released it from two concealed catches. This revealed internals every bit as tidy and solidly put together as the stylish outer casing.
Kingston RAM beneath flying leads
Since I'd specified a DAC-less version to use my own converters, this aria didn't come with an analogue output stage. And because I'd asked for the 2TB SSD option, there was no spinning HHD anywhere in sight, just two compact stacked 1TB Western Digital solid-state memory modules.

The linear power supply lacked the surrounding metal partition shown on the previous page; and the display was empty since it's only filled for the DAC-enabled version***. Having ripped a few albums and made sound already, it was time to learn what if any SQ adjustments were necessary to get this aria to sing as expected.
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*** "By mistake I sent you a photo of a prototype of our next aria chassis with metal partition and cover to hide cabling which isn't yet finalized. The aria we sent you is the current hardware production version. For the display, we're currently studying options for the standard aria without DAC to provide some info about booting and ripping status."