Audirvana Plus, Amarra, Bit Perfect

[aahonari]

Hi guys,

For the past few days I have been auditioning Audirvana Plus and Amarra ( not the hifi version the stand-alone $189 version). These two programs are feeding my flac songs to my Arcam irDAC which in turn feeds my Full Class A Musical Fidelity AMS 35i amp. I want to know if I any of you are using any of these programs and which one you prefer better. For me Audirvana sounds more neutral, while a free program called Vox !!! sounds more expansive. The least favourite for me, thus far, is Amarra as it dampens the sounds too much for my taste -- maybe I am doing something wrong. Also I should note that all of these are feeding the DAC flat (no EQ enhancements). You're inputs are much appreciated.

Oh, one more thing: I am looking for a better DAC to replace the Arcam (budget ~ GBP 2,000). Gimme your suggestion, so that I could narrow my demoing options.

P.S. Should it matter, my speakers are Focal Electra 1038

 

[cheeseboy]

in theory, if you are outputting bitpefect then they shoud all sound the same as the software is just passing the signal through to the dac. If they aren't, then the software isn't outputting an uncoloured signal and is doing something to it.

As for a replacment dac, I can't personally comment, but for that price there has been a lot of interest in the Chord Hugo...

 

[MajorFubar]

I never found the need to use anything but BitPerfect (think it's about $10). I'm sure there's lots of technical wizardry behind the scenes, but from a user's perspective, BitPerfect hogs the sound-card, loads the full track into RAM before playback (assuming you have enough RAM) and if you have any HD audio tracks, it automatically performs the tedious task of switching the bitrate on your DAC, which iTunes won't do on its own. I can understand the benefits of it doing all of those things, so I didn't feel its makers were selling snake oil. I never saw the point of buying iTunes plug-ins for $100+ (in some cases $1,000+) when all they can surely do is the same thing as BitPerfect.

 

[adamrobertshaw]

I've used Audirvana Plus for a year. It can be set up to upsample and all my Apple lossless and podcasts are upsampled to 24/192. It does annoy me though when I sometimes close it and I-Tunes has to be restarted to get Audirvana working again. It's about as much as I'll spend on a plug in. But well worth the sonic upgrade for me. A bit of setting tweaks and it works practically straight out of the tin.

I've also been using J River Media 19 (partly to rip FLAC to my NAS) on a PC and after some poncing about on the set up (which Chord has customer support pdfs for) I got it playing as well as Audirvana Plus. I also upsample from J River.

But if you'd seen my face when Windows Update rebooted my PC in the middle of an album ... well you just don't get your stereo doing that do you?!!

I've trialed other players on the PC but either the UI bothered me or it was just too technical to set up.

 

[pauln]

But if you'd seen my face when Windows Update rebooted my PC in the middle of an album ... well you just don't get your stereo doing that do you?!!

Got it set to automatic then? Just change the settings.