Audirvana Studio

[copy_of_a]

1 hour ago, Musicophile said:

This is a pretty cool feature. I can finally retire Musicscope. 

 

is the volume control dithered?

 

[copy_of_a]

I have been using A+ for years (side by side with HQPlayer) but this update is not for me.
I perfectly understand that it’s a fine update for many users, though!

As far as „audiophile“ sound goes…:

• A+ once threw out Dither at the end of the processing chain (after replay gain and upsampling that is) leaving us with truncation distortion.
• Instead of incorporating Dither back again we now get a new SRC in form of r8brain … which is really cool but nothing to freak out about since iZotope and SoX are great tools just as well
• Latency compensation of plugins has not beeen taken care of in a professional way in conjunction with DSD-upsampling for years
• DSD upsampling quality is mediocre at best (IMHO) and the implementation is more CPU intensive as it should be (compared to the excellent CPU/RAM management in HQPlayer; it’s still better than JRiver in this regard, though ..  at least this is my impression on my Macs)
• „pure“ (unprocessed) Playback sounds absolutely excellent, though!

 

In V3.5 Library is pretty good, iPhone remote works elegantly and responsive and now with „Studio“ we apparently have even better integration of streaming services … and this seems to be the main direction of the development. In fact using streaming services such as Qobuz through Audrivana is really cool as music gets reliably preloaded into RAM before playback, which of course makes a difference.
I look through all the well known download shops weekly for new music and if something is of interest for me, I buy the respective album (or song) as Reebok or HiRes download. Streaming as such I only use for background enjoyment and for this Spotify mostly does it for me.
My take: Audirvana developed from a dedicated super lightweight audiophile player more towards user convenience incorporating streaming services. SQ became second priority - at least there is no mention at all of a newly designed processing pipeline and new SDM processing; so I assume it’s the same in Studio as in prior versions.
At the same time HQPlayer also incorporated for instance replay gain and in conjunction with the really well designed HQPDcontrol app replaces Audirvana for me with regard to usability. And it outperforms A+ SQ wise WRT playback (of local files)… IMHO.
So I happily keep V3.5 for background listening but, sorry, I won’t jump the Audirvana Studio train.