I've just recently tried the demo Audirvana, and am in the middle of a Pure Music trial. Testing was done with a grab-bag folder of 4000 tracks. They both sound slightly more robust than iTunes, and that in itself is dismaying. Seems to me any player should be sending the same 1s and 0s to the DAC. Pure Music's upsampling was very compelling, at first. But when I played familiar classics, it became evident it was mangling the files somehow. Worse, Pure Music is way too fiddly and finicky for my purposes. While they do visibly post instructions to minimize or disable many computer functions to optimize music playing, that's a non-starter for me. Might as well buy an outboard player in hardware form instead. Worst of all, PM occasionally stalls or stutters. (My iMac is loaded.)Īt least Audirvana is stable. Likely due to its independent-from-iTunes operation. I wouldn't call its library management great to work with, compared to iTunes. Guess I'll reluctantly buy this one only to play back the tiny number of DSD files in the system. Unless, as it's been suggested, it can't handle large libraries. I'm not sure what large is I don't think I'll ever exceed 50,000 tracks. My impression so far is that all these software players are tinker-toys compared to an outboard player.What is general opinion on Roon sound quality? I have used Audirvana+ for 5 years and updated each time a new version came out. I changed DACs 2 weeks ago, and my new DAC is more resolving of my server (Mac Mini with Uptone Audio MMK, LPS, SSD, 8 meg RAM feeding USB to my DAC. It sounds fantastic, but it got me thinking. So I spent all day on trying Amarra, HQ player, PureMusic, then lastly Roon. Audirvana+ is still ahead of all of these except Roon. I tried Roon about 18 months ago and it was nothing special. I don't upsample, and feed my NOS DAC resident rate. Swopping between A+ and Roon on select tracks, they sound very similar, closer than the rest of the bunch. But A+ has a digital sound to it, a very slight coarseness that clings to the treble region, most noticeable on female vocals for example.
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