This is review and detailed measurements of the Aurender A10 streamer and player. It was kindly loaned to me for brief testing by Gig Harbor audio. The unit retails for USD $5,500. For that, you get a streamer and DAC with 4 TBytes of storage and SSD for caching.If you are not familiar with Aurender, they are the most common streamer I see at audio shows. In that regard, its price is not a larger percentage of a high-end audio system but of course, significantly higher than the typical desktop products we talk about.The unit I tested was quite hefty and had pretty high-end fit and finish. Please excuse the quality of the mobile phone picture in dim lighting:The unit I was testing kept complaining about the SSD needing repair due to improper shutdown but it allowed me to use it anyway. Was strange that it did not use some kind of journaling file system to allow quick recovery from a power failure.For my testing, I was only interested in its performance as a DAC. I am sure there are a lot of reviews online about its operation as a streamer. I connected the unit using S/PDIF (or was it Toslink?) since there is no USB interface. Actually there is a USB interface but it is the host side, allowing external storage to be connected to the unit.Due to limited amount of time, these measurements are not as extensive as my typical review but I think we can get a good performance of its performance anyway. Let's start with our dashboard:We see that the unit is very close to matching its stated performance as far as distortion and noise. This places the Aurender A10 in the top tier of DACs tested:Next I ran intermodulation test:The A10 uses AKM4490 DAC chip which unlike ESS DACs has a linear and smooth intermoduation distortion curve (good). We see that it essentially matches the Topping DX3 Pro DAC which uses an AKM DAC. While the DX3 Pro saturates a bit at higher levels, the A10 barely does so. Very nice.Finally I ran the linearity test:The Aurender A10 nails this test, producing essentially textbook perfect results.The triplet of tests that I ran on Aurender A10 shows it to be a very well engineered machine. It produces performance at the top level of DACs tested, falling just shy of state-of-the-art. For people wanting a fully configured streamer as opposed to building their own out of PCs, Macs or Raspberry Pi boards, it makes a very good option. Yes, $5,500 is fair bit of money but my own server cost me nearly half of that and I had to put in a lot time and effort to build it.So overall, if you are looking for a high-end streamer, I can recommend the Aurender A10 from performance point of view.-------------As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.If you like this review, please considerfunds to support these reviews using:or https://audiosciencereview.com/foru...eview-and-measurements.2164/page-3#post-59054 ).