DSD playback with Pure Music

[eatapc]

Last weekend a friend of mine had trouble at his audio society when trying to demo DSD playback. At one point he complained that DSD "isn't ready for prime time." I wanted to demonstrate how (relatively) easy it is to play high-res DSD downloads on a Mac with Pure Music -- even if you don't have a new DAC with native DSD playback. I'm staying out of the fight as to how DSD compares to high-res PCM. (Obviously, it's complicated.) The fact is, there are some good albums out there that were mastered as DSD, so I want to be able to buy them now and play them without sacrificing sound quality or iTunes convenience.

 

Demo on YouTube. For convenience, I did the screen capture using my laptop and it's internal sound card, rather than my main music system with its external Bel Canto DAC (which does not do native DSD conversion).

 

 

A few months ago I tried Korg AudioGate to convert the files to PCM first, then bring them into iTunes, but I didn't like what AudioGate did to the sound. Some albums showed signs of clipping with AudioGate. Pure Music sounds much better -- even doing the conversion on the fly. The CPU usage is not that bad.

 

Take care -- Mark Block