Audivana Plus is a giant leap forward in sound reproduction from computer stored music. I have heard most of them and once I heard this version I stopped looking further. Each of the softwares (Pure Music, Bitperfect, etc.) has a bit of a signature sound and differ ever so slightly from each other. The interface is perfect for me. It will turn off extraneous running programs on my Mac Mini, go native or upsample, and most importantly, load to the RAM so there is no play from the hard drive. I hear a very natural and musical, life-like performance. All these programs are in constant development and continue to leap-frog each other. I think my money was well-spent.
Any Audirvana Plus enthusiasts out there?
Last September I bought an Audioquest Dragonfly. In my quest to feed it the best sampling rates to get the best sound, I also downloaded and bought Audirvana Plus. After messing around with the system for awhile I concluded I was getting more benefit from Audirvana than the Dragonfly, so I took the Dragonfly back. So lately I'm reading the reviews of the new Meridian Explorer and I'm thinking that maybe it'll give me the extra level of musical satisfaction that I didn't quite get from the Dragonfly.
But wait! the next time I open Audirvana I find that I haven't updated for awhile. I do an update and jump from 1.4.6 to 1.5.2, and now I'm at 1.5.4. Is it just me or did something special happen with 1.5.x, because I'm enjoying computer audio as I never have before. Just since upgrading to 1.5.4 I've already downloaded 5 new 24/96 or 24/88.2 files from HDTracks. Where before computer-based audio mostly served as background music, and I reserved involved listening to the turntable, now when I'm cleaning up the kitchen with Audirvana playing 24-bit files, the musical truth draws me out of the kitchen to sit or stand in the sweet spot and take it all in, just like when I first got a turntable to break free from mass market CD players and redbook CDs.
I'm not saying that LPs and 24/96 digital are identical, and I still like good analog a bit better, but the 24-bit files through Audirvana 1.5.x files really draw me into the music. There may be an asynchronous 24/192Khz USB DAC in my future, but for now the improvements to Audirvana are making me pretty happy with computer audio.
Anybody else have any opinions on this?
But wait! the next time I open Audirvana I find that I haven't updated for awhile. I do an update and jump from 1.4.6 to 1.5.2, and now I'm at 1.5.4. Is it just me or did something special happen with 1.5.x, because I'm enjoying computer audio as I never have before. Just since upgrading to 1.5.4 I've already downloaded 5 new 24/96 or 24/88.2 files from HDTracks. Where before computer-based audio mostly served as background music, and I reserved involved listening to the turntable, now when I'm cleaning up the kitchen with Audirvana playing 24-bit files, the musical truth draws me out of the kitchen to sit or stand in the sweet spot and take it all in, just like when I first got a turntable to break free from mass market CD players and redbook CDs.
I'm not saying that LPs and 24/96 digital are identical, and I still like good analog a bit better, but the 24-bit files through Audirvana 1.5.x files really draw me into the music. There may be an asynchronous 24/192Khz USB DAC in my future, but for now the improvements to Audirvana are making me pretty happy with computer audio.
Anybody else have any opinions on this?