JeffCullen

I am getting those little fraction-of-a-second dropouts very occasionally. Don't care!

I've got Direct mode working, but not integer. I have often found that if I start a listening session with redbook, I'll enjoy it. Then if I progress to high res, it'll sound even better. But if I spend time in high-res, then in the same listening session try to go back to redbook, I find myself just wanting to turn it off. So far in my Audirvana experience, I've had it configured to use the iZotope SRC at the "Best" quality settings, then I went into the Advanced Settings and jacked the "Steepness" up to its max of 200dB. My impression is that it has been making red book sound like what I'm used to from high-res. Turning upsampling off is indeed painful--flat and glarey, typical CD... subtleties buried, out of focous. I just tried switching from the iZotope SRC to the built in CoreAudio one on the Audio Filters tab (which I suspect is what I was listening to with Deicbel, when tricked into doing upsampling). The result was very interesting indeed! It's better than redbook... but has different problems of its own, which are clear now after getting used to the sound of the iZotope SRC. It sounds very laid back, like all the urgency and PRaT is just completely gone. Sounds very much like the async upsampling in my Assemblage D2D-1 box, which I've found really hit and miss. The CoreAudio SRC is also seems to bring out nasty sibilence... The iZotope plugin, in contrast to the other two, sounds deep and wide and in focus and effortless and highly resolving and lovely, more like actual high res... I would love to understand why this sounds so much better... What a revelation. I haven't experienced anything this drastic with redbook in a LONG time! THANKS!

I jumped with joy the day that feature expanded from simply "Convert higher bitrate songs to 128 kbps AAC" to have that wonderful drop down box that allows me to select 256 kbps!

I'm now a few cuts into my favouite Little Dragon album, their 2007 eponymous debut. Similar considerable improvements in percussion decay and room/reverb sounds... also, the (prodigious) bass seems tightened up, and subtleties I haven't noticed before in the vocal tracks are coming out... not to mention plenty of subtle elements previously buried in the mix! This is stuff I expect to hear from hi-res, but not red book... I am absolutely stunned that playback software can sound so different. What's next, converting all my FLAC and Apple Lossles files to AIFF?!?

Thanks Melvin, Musicophile. Got the latest Beta Audirvana going and optimally configured. Preferred Decibel's interface... but not having to think about screwing around with configuring the sample rate wins out. What I wasn't expecting was an improvement in sound quality... I just had Factory Once's '94 CD release of Vini Reilly's (Durutti Column) LC digitally "spinning"... I've never heard the decay on the percussion and sounds of the recording space like this. Goosebumps! I'm guessing the iZotope SRC in Audirvana smokes whatever Decibel was doing. Now onto Air's Pocket Symphony. Again, the sounds of the "space" are a revelation, clear from the first few seconds... Appreciate the reco! Cheers, --jeff

Hi John -- thanks for your recos. I'll try Audirvana Plus tomorrow. I'd prefer to avoid something dependent on the iTunes interface so I can easily keep my iLife (i.e. music on my iPhone for the car) separate from home hi-fi.

Hi all! Long time computer audio enthusiast (got to be 15 years now...), first time poster! My rig is rather "old school" -- details are in my profile... My music library consists of everything from 16/44.1 to 24/192, and pretty much everything in between... my old-school DAC only goes up to 24/96. While my experiences with the asynchronous upsampling offered by the Assemblage D2D-1 in my signal chain have been a mixed bag, I've recently been finding that I like what's happening when synchronously upsampling 44.1KHz and 48KHz material (2x given the limitations of my DAC). I'm running Decibel on OS X. I've got Decibel's SRC quality set to max, and "adjust sample rate for best quality" is turned off. In order to achieve what I'm looking for, every time my source material changes sample rate, I have to close Decibel, change the sample rate in Audio Midi Setup to what I want to hear, then re-open Decibel and pick up listening. I would love if this process could be automated on the fly, adding automatic synchronous upsampling (up to the maximum input capabilities of my DAC) of lower res material to Decibel's existing capability of simply changing the sample rate on the fly to that of the source material. (minor added bonus if HDCD-encoded 16/44.1 could be left untouched as my DAC decodes it, and I like what it does...) Does any playback software do this? I'd switch to any platform and would happily pay for such a feature. Thanks! edit: another bonus if I could switch absolute polarity through software so I could do this from my listening position rather than getting up to hit the switch on the DAC...