Yes TJ-Sully, obviously it's all about the sound, I wouldn't have bought it if it didn't sound better.....
I demoed an Aurender for ten days against my BDP-2, and the Aurender consistently produced much the better sound, by quite some margin.
It has USB out only, but even so against the AES/EBU connected BDP-2, the Aurender was still better.
A big bonus is the iPad Conductor App which works perfectly, displays album covers and includes Tidal and an easy-to-use search function.
On top of that it has 6TB of internal disk, plus the ability to stream from a NAS if required.
I have been using Bryston for 15 years and I originally bought a BDP-1 shortly after it was announced. I then upgraded to BDP-2 when that was released, mainly because the BDP-1 was so slow, unreliable and frustrating to use.
Sad to say the day to day operational experience with the second player hasn't been that great, but it's the lack of a properly sorted App, with no expectation of there ever being one
that finally made me look elsewhere.
I am a big fan of Bryston, I've had eight power amps, two preamp/processors and two dacs since 2000, and currently have a SP3, 2 x 7B-SST2 and a 9B-SST into PMC IB2i and DB1 speakers.
I'm very frustrated and disappointed that Bryston haven't got their act together with the firmware and an App for their player - their competitors have.