sctubes

sasbyte - I tend to agree with you. The single biggest improvement to my system, as far as playing digital music and by a long stretch, was Amarra. Adding a DAC did make an additional improvement to the sound from the computer. Similar to what you note, I experimented with a cheap, 10+ year old, Sony DVD player, where I connected the audio output to the preamp and the digital output via the DAC and switched between the two. There was some difference, but very marginal and hardly worth worrying about.

The volume control can be disabled if you don't plug directly into a power amp.

I have the DacMagic Plus, for almost two years. It's solid and I never had a problem with it. Sadly I don't have another DAC to compare it to, but it is a major upgrade from using the computer audio output, which is what I used before I had it. It is connected to an old MacBook on one hand and to Dynaudio Contour 5.4 via a PrimaLuna Dialog preamp and monoblocks on the other. Funnily I am on this forum today to try and figure out whether it is time to replace it with something higher end.

Mike - What's the rest of your system? If you have a receiver (or any combination of amps) already, then maybe you should consider a standalone DAC if the audio quality from your computer is not sufficient. Another thought is that in order to achieve maximum sound quality it would be good to ensure your music is stored uncompressed.

Steve, thanks for your comments. You are right that I have been listening to iTunes, having just transitioned from using MP3 to using AIFF that must be the reason for the change in sound quality. Cant wait to see what it would sound like with a proper player. A few additional attributes of the problem I am seeing: - When starting Amarra + iTunes, if the playing mode is not changed to iTunes before attempting to play any music then it would be impossible to play anything in any mode - I am using Cambridge DACMagic Plus. Tried with both USB connection and Bluetooth, it makes no difference to the symptoms Any advice would be helpful.

Hello All, This is my first post on this forum. Many thanks to the members for lots of useful information I learned while lurking. I installed a trial version of Amarra HiFi this weekend (2.5 build 4460) and am encountering several problems. First, it does not play in the Amarra playback mode (blue indicator), only in the iTunes mode (yellow indicator). Second, occasionally the music will shut down while iTunes still shows the song as playing. Jiggling the iTunes volume control on the screen or the iPad remote app brings the sound back to life. Not sure if it only happens between tracks or mid-track also. Will have to wait for the problem to happen again. Other than that, it sounds amazing, I love the way computer audio plays through my main system (Primaluna Dialogue 3 + Dialogue 7 monoblocks, Dynaudio speakers), but even connected through the computer's line out connector to my crummy home office stereo (JVC FS-7000). I'd appreciate any help or advice. Technical details: Mac Pro early 2009 2.66 GHz Quad Core Xeon, 12GB memory, plenty of it free. Mac OS X 10.7.5. iTunes 11.0.2 (26) Music is on my iOmega NAS iX4-200d, all AIFF files.