Audirvana Origin

[Jud]

3 hours ago, swordpen said:

Yes, BIO's (or BIO'S is correct as BIOS would mean something different. bio's is incorrect as the full word would be biographies, not biography's.

 

The English language. Oh so much fun.

 

Apologies for continuing the OT: Since an apostrophe stands for missing letters, bio's would serve for biographies.

 

I think Studio, and therefore Origin, is quite solid at this point.  At least it is in my user experience.  The remote also works nicely (haven't tried Origin; I'm assuming the remote works with it as well).

[Jud]

3 hours ago, One and a half said:

 

Accuphase DAC Playback is PCM converted and the DSD settings are greyed out, it's a subtle non purple. The DAC can natively play DSD, Jriver does it all the time.

You’ll want to check the DAC settings in Origin. Are you playing direct from DAC or over a network?

 

Edit: Never mind, I see the DAC settings show DSD256 capability. So then you want to tell Origin you’d like it to upsample (presumably to DSD256).

[Jud]

Future scans will be faster, if my experience with Studio is any indication.  12K files takes AS maybe 20 seconds, guesstimating.

[Jud]

15 minutes ago, Dandou said:

 

The screenshots that I posted are not the only ones of messed artists. 

There are plenty of sorting errors like that. 

Here in "DSD View", what the albums of Cream have to do between Eric Bibb and Eric Kunzel? 

 

 

 

 

Only to find all these errors in my library that counts over 140K tracks will require me to spend a few weekends on this task. 

 

"Albums" are shown for multiple artists who appear on an album as songwriters, for example.  So perhaps there are tracks on these Cream albums credited to artists (or one particular artist?) whose names appear in the alphabet between the Erics.

[Jud]

Is File Location a sort criterion for albums in Origin? Don’t know about others, but I have artists sorted into individual folders alphabetically, so using File Location as the first sort criterion would take care of album order if you have your artists arranged into folders this way.

[Jud]

8 hours ago, Dandou said:

Yes, this is a practical feature, and it's good that Audirvana added it to the player. 

 

Unfortunately, it's not really useful for the albums of classical music. 

It can certainly get complicated for classical. What I did in my directory structure for classical was arrange albums in the way I remembered them. For example, I like Jordi Savall very much, so all of his albums, no matter which composer’s music he is playing, are in subfolders under the Jordi Savall folder. But I might (and do) have other conductors’, artists’, and orchestras’ versions of Beethoven symphonies in subfolders under the Beethoven folder, for example.

 

This structure reflects the way I remember and look for these various classical pieces, and therefore using File Location in Audirvana does as well.

 

Of course others may have so many classical pieces that remembering any sort of organizational structure becomes impossible.

[Jud]

2 hours ago, feelingears said:

But I also am wondering about what this "new software" and pricing maneuver means

 

Very simple: When Audirvana Studio came out, many people asked for a version that was not subscription but rather a one-time payment. So Damien listened. Many people also said they didn't need the extra features like radio stations and streaming, just something to play local files. This made for a fortunate intersection, allowing software with the requested reduced feature set to be offered at an affordable one-time price.

 

So that's the explanation - Damien has given a large number of users what they asked for.

[Jud]

7 hours ago, jgeffen said:

It looks like the problems I have had with my former streamer in the past. Those problems are difficult 😞 to solve by Audirvāna, because the DLNA/UPnP implementation on certain streamers are not ‘straight forward’, so I replaced my Yamaha streamer wit an Lindemann audio bridge 2, and that device is working perfectly with Audirvāna. I guess any pure audio bridge will work perfectly, because the manufacturers of such devices have no reason to alter the DLNA/UPnP software.

 

Yes, this is a key thing to realize - implementation of the UPnP/DLNA "standard" is riddled with exceptions. So software developers are confronted with the choice of implementing the standard and providing workarounds for the hundreds of different exceptions, or going off in some non-standard direction of their own.

 

This is over and above any other network glitches that may exist. The few times I've had problems with Audirvana, I've tried HQPlayer and gotten the same results. So all of the Audirvana "bugs" may not be Audirvana's. (Certainly some will be, but be alert to the possibility that not all are.)

[Jud]

1 hour ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

In a way I'm surprised at the acceptance of UPnP/DLNA by audiophiles over something like Ravenna. Perhaps we have no choice for now. I use Audirvana Studio with Ravenna and can report it's rock solid. 

 

I found this: https://www.micromedia.ch/?product=digimedia-hpa-dac-for-aes67-ravenna

 

Know of any other DACs under $2000 that use Ravenna?

[Jud]

There may be some resolution limitations involved with current Ravenna hardware and software. The Anubis Pro has a max input resolution of 192kHz; Anubis Premium will accept up to DSD256.

 

I seem to recall a while back reading that Dante hardware at the time was limited to 96kHz, but I have no idea if that's still true (if it ever was).

[Jud]

Does Audirvana Direct Mode work with Ravenna?

[Jud]

25 minutes ago, Mark Robinson said:

In mastering we use two DACs, a transfer DAC and a monitor DAC. The transfer DAC gets baked into the sound of the final master (that the consumer hears) and the monitor DAC is used only for the engineer's monitoring path.

 

My monitor DAC is a Lavry Quintessence, which is a very transparent delta sigma DAC, great at revealing whats actually there, and nothing more.

 

My transfer DACs are selected on a per project basis according to the sound quality of the incoming mixes (ie: thin, punchy, dark, jumpy, brittle, narrow, congested, etc).  They are the Holo May KTE (R2R NOS), SW1X DAC III Balanced (tube R2R NOS), and Merging DA8P (Delta Sigma OS).

 

4 hours ago, Mark Robinson said:

This is only true if you love the sound of oversampling. As a grammy winning mastering engineer, I can tell you point blank that oversampling pulls the master away from the original analog sound.  

 

How do I know this?  Because I have mastered countless songs from half inch 2 track tape (ATR-102), and the moment you start oversampling the original PCM transfer, you leave the analog capture behind and move towards a DSP sound that many people love because it makes them think their systems sound better than they really are.

 

When I listen to Audirvana VS HQPlayer using my 96khz PCM transfer (via Lavry Savitr ADC), I cannot say HQPlayer sounds better. 

Some people think oversampling sounds better, some don't. (This is also somewhat dependent on the sample rate output by the ADC.) Some like the sound they get from HQPlayer, some from Audirvana, others don't hear a difference.

 

All of you should let me know when you have convinced everyone else that your way is the right one. 😂

[Jud]

7 hours ago, Mark Robinson said:

I believe both my DS DACs are filtering and oversampling.  Some projects sound better when I transfer thru them, but most projects I prefer R2R NOS. The R2R NOS transfers are typically a little darker, but this can be easily made up for with a gentle shelving EQ.

 

I have no problem with how people like to enjoy their music in their homes (im not sure how this applies?), but I do have a problem when a delivery format changes the intended sound of a master while operating under the guise of transparency.

 

For example, I have a few thousand masters on Tidal that have been MQA'd after my delivery to the client.  The MQA process represents a clear deviation from the sound I delivered to the artist or label who hired me.  Im allowed to object to what MQA is doing because they are altering my work after the fact. In a similar way, this is what is happening to my masters when they are massively oversampled for playback - the sound deviates from the engineer's intention.

 

It's quite interesting that you object to MQA. MQA's filters are so short they in fact do very little filtering, leading to imaging and intermodulation distortion. This distortion is something they have in common with NOS DACs, particularly on RedBook material. However, whether the distortion products are strong enough to be audible is open to question.

 

Oversampling, particularly for RedBook material and if done well, removes much of this distortion and is thus measurably closer to the original. So if NOS is preferred, it's worth asking yourself what (if anything) it is about the sound that makes it so.

 

Of course what I said before about convincing everyone else you're right applies to me too, so if you're not convinced, that's perfectly fine. Peace. 🙂

 

(And lastly, apologies for continuing the off-topic.)

[Jud]

3 hours ago, One and a half said:

Audirvana Origin operates to an ASIO USB DAC input with my system, has done so for many months.

I thought I was hearing things some time ago, must be more volume and less background noise today, there's a distinct hiss for a half a second prior to any track starting, affects redbook or DSD doesn't matter. 

Thought it was the DAC driver was dropping out with conclusion of a track or cable something, Jriver Media Center V27 plays just fine, so the hardware is OK.

Memory allocation is generous. Is there a fix for this?

 

Oh I had to restart the computer, some unexpected network traffic starved Audirvana, saw a ghost, went pale, well, even Task Manager could not delete, so had to restart.

Indexing is as slow as EVAH, nothing's changed, why do I put up with this JUNK?

 

 

 

Just haven't had problems like that, so must have different system configurations. Particularly with the beta now they're interested in good careful bug feedback, so testing could help you and them.

[Jud]

Using Studio, and agree about painless so far and UI improvements.

[Jud]

4 hours ago, One and a half said:

In order to keep a noisy tower server away from listening area, Audirvana can play to a renderer which is fine. 

I would prefer to have a very low power pc with USB output direct to a DAC. Does Audirvana have an 'agent' like NAA which can reside on a or several client machines, that can output directly from a main server to a local DAC? 

This could also allow multi room transmission of the same content. 

It works with the UPnP/DLNA standard.