Audirvana Plus 3.5

[One and a half]

Audirvana re-visit

 

After using Roon for 12 months or more, Roon's playback has not been engaging, head to head comparisons with CD revealed the finer details were missing, certain roughness. Why not give a shot to A+ again... The license for A+ 3x was upgraded to the latest version, less than EUR30, OK. For trial, A+ was installed on a HP-Z800 Win10 Dual Xeon 64GB RAM Workstation and networked to a Lumin U1. Memory allocation is 42GB. No forced upsampling used.

 

The Plusses

 

Oh immediate change! Cleaner sound, micro details are there, and there's emotion in music again. Still, recordings that have drums sound like a paper bag, sound like a paper bag, but the well recorded music especially at 48fs original rates are very good. Detection of the Lumin U1 is seamless, works well. comparison now to CD/SACD is 'the same' for CD, with SACD just passing the post a little earlier.  This is what I wanted, the 'convenience' and easier choice of digital with sound quality to match of rotating disc.

 

Library cataloging for 10,000 tracks took about 3-4 hours, Roon would take days..! 

 

Now, am I listening to two different architectures or two different pieces of software or the same software output, cause they do sound different. The Roon server is single Xeon/Supermicro 2 years old versus the HP Z-800 10 years old. The HP goes through all the switches to the Lumin, Roon connection is direct.

 

The Minuses

 

So why not try A+ on the Roon Server. Bzzzt. wrong. A+ will not install on a Win2016 platform from the website installer.

Advancing the time slider for the track activates the DAC's mute relay, this is really annoying. There's enough memory allocated, and still does this?

DSD to PCM direct (without stop) selection causes the DAC's mute relay to switch at least three times. Sometimes the relay doesn't shut up.

Playing back the 2nd last played track in an album again, also causes the relay to activate.

Mute DAC is on, and delay is set to 3.0s for bridge devices.

 

If anyone could provide guidance on removing the minuses, I could live with Audirvana.

 

Equipment/config in the signature.