Amarra V2.11, Initial Positive Impressions

[ianmacc]

Hi

 

System: Mac Mini 2010, Weiss INT202, Naim DAC, Naim 252 Pre …..

 

I have given V 2.11 several hours of uninterrupted listening this morning and I am pleasantly surprised.

 

Listening to a wide variety of music, classical, rock, blues, jazz etc I am finding the sound to be very clean and dare I say, very analogue in presentation. I just want to keep listening to music whereas, for some reason I can’t explain, with V 2.1 my interest waived after an hour or so.

 

There is no fatigue even after hours of listening V 2.11 - and I haven’t had to reboot Amarra once so far.

 

No clicks or pops (but the solution to that was discovered in a previous post with the kind help of Frank), no crashes when loading from Finder.

 

So far it has worked faultlessly and I have tried my hardest to “overload” it with various tests with and without Cache.

 

The soundstage seems fine, wider than V 2.1 but I would welcome other members experience of this as I can’t really remember how it was on V 2.0. I am hoping this isn’t me kidding myself! Unfortunately, I can’t quickly do an A B comparison of 2.1 and 2.11 to confirm any definite improvement in the soundstage but as I say, it all sounds great at the moment.

 

I notice that the EQ is set at “Flat” now I have upgraded to 2.11. Frequencies are set at 12000.0, 740.0, 32.0. I didn’t take note of these settings on 2.1 – does anyone know if these have been tweaked, hence a possible reason for the perceived improvement in sound?

 

I am looking forward to other comments, for me though it is back to the music for the rest of the day!

 

Regards, Ian Manchester, UK

 

 

 

[stefangustaf]

 

I have tested it, but there is problems with memory play. If I have file over 150 MB, eg a 96 kHz track over 4 minutes long, then it is a quirk after approx 4 secs play.

 

My feeling is that the memory play feature in Amarra is not well implemented.

 

BR

Stefan Gustafsson

Sweden

 

[HiFiInsider]

Should I be worry about Memory Play overloading the RAM?

 

[ericsound]

I've spent a few hours comparing Ayrewave, Audirvana and Amarra on my system. Here are my findings. The usual disclaimer applies: these are my personal notes on my system; I certainly do not claim any "thruth" or "verdict".

 

The music I've used for this:

 

Jen Chapin, You haven't done nothing from Revisions (24/96 flac)

Janis Ian, Ride me like wave from Breaking Silence (500 MB 16/44 single wav rip)

Nils Lofgren, Keith don't go from Acoustic Live (16/44 flac)

Tracy Chapman, 3000 Miles from Where you live (500 MB 14/44 single wav rip)

 

 

Ayrewave version 1.0b6

Audirvana version 0.4b

Amarra version 2.1.1 (demo, I can only hope there are no audible differences!)

 

My system consists of Macbook Pro (10.6.5 in 64-bit mode) coupled with a TOSlink to a Beresford TC-7510 DAC, Musical Fidelity F25/F15 pre/power driving B&W 804s. To be honest I was a bit surprised the "El Cheapo" Beresford DAC was able to produce differences at all but they were definitely present.

 

Ayrewave was in genereal the lesser player, a bit muddy in the lows and significant less imaging of voices and instruments. Ayrewave was rock stable though.

Audirvana produced a better soundstage and a thighter bass. The overall sound was very close to Amarra with 16/44 resolution. I had some initial issues after changing settings but they vanished after rebooting. Some quirks but perfectly acceptable.

Amarra IMHO excelled in the higher resolution track from Jen Chapin but the difference was not big. For me at least not big enough to motivate the price for Amarra. Amarra did ocassionally crash and produce clicks. From a software point of view this is the lesser product.

 

It's good to see these programs are competing and getting better with every version. Probably the ordering wil differ with upcoming versions. It's definitely a compliment for you open source guys to be able to be in the same league as Amarra.

 

BTW: a better DAC is already in the works; I've ordered a Metrum Acoustics NOS Quad mini (made in Holland) which had a rave review at hifi.nl.

 

Eric

 

 

 

 

 

[ericsound]

If any program uses more RAM than availabe the operating system starts using the hard disk as an alternative. And harddisks are much slower than RAM. But any decent Mac shoud have at least 2GB RAM which enables you to load at least one single WAV rip of a complete CD in memory so I don't think that this is a real problem. Not if you quit other programs' while playing.

 

[stefangustaf]

The problem I was reporting about glitch after around 3-4 secs playing appears on a macbook pro 4GB memory. I think this has nothing to do with memory size it seems more like a timing problem. As I wrote before the memory/cache implemnntation does not seem stable.my feeling is that they have done a quirk around their sonic engine and not implement it in a 100% right way.

I am using a Weiss Minerva Dac via Firewire.

 

//Stefan Gustafsson

 

[f1eng]

I haven't tried with a recent version but when I tried Amarra on my Mac Pro connected by toslink to an Audio Synthesis DAC only the iTunes bit worked, Amarra only connecting via USB or firewire.

Must try this again since up to now I thought I was stuck with iTunes on my study system.

 

Either that or you prefer iTunes to the others :-)

 

[kaka]

A question to Sonic Studio :

 

Nice to have it remember that I am using cache, I missed clicking it back on once or twice using 2.1

I started Amarra up with your default cache (512) and bumped it up to 2gb, but I notice that the media drive is reading constantly so the 2Gb must only kick in after an Amarra restart.

 

My question

What does Amarra do if the playlist is bigger than the cache size - cache what it can or cache nothing? I looked in the new manual but I don't think it says

 

And their reply :

 

We load up to the CACHE limit and ignore (do not load) the rest.

Please know the CACHE will not prevent all disc access - just reduce it -

The OS could still swap the audio data out if it needed to.

You will also see access from all sorts of other apps perhaps if you look at the Applications ->Utilities->Activity Monitor.

 

 

 

 

[stefangustaf]

To clearify. The glitch after 3-4 secs of play with cache enabled only occurs when I manage the tracks from Itunes. Not when playing thru a playlist. It seems to be some kind of timing problem between amarra and itunes,

 

//Stefan