rxetera

Yes I was sure the track was stopped before I opened up the Preferences window to "randomly" select the integer/direct buttons. Then CMD-W to close the window without knowing what setting was made and started the track again. I'll give it another go, as well as try the izotope upsampling suggestion. Generally my testing methodology is to take a 24/192 recorded track and downsample it to test for audible differences. As I mentioned earlier I could not hear a difference even when I downsampled with the Sox "quick" to 16/44.1. I also don't generally agree with Jud about not being able to hear a difference because I'm trying too hard and not relaxing and enjoying the music; but since I have generally be relaxing and enjoying my music for two weeks now with my Denon cans, 11.32 DAC and Audirvana+ with Integer/Direct and my trial is about to end, I will now go to the other "extreme" and use iTunes with the built-in headphone jack and see what I get. You'll have to wait a few weeks for those results :-) What concerns me is that people with "golden ears" will go on and on about how mode "X" and upsampled tracks sound so much better, but when I suggest that their player is quite possibly inserting distortion into the signal, then they go on the attack without stepping back and testing for themselves. Has anyone tried the tests I suggested, or experiments like taking their favorite tracks and inserting noise at some lower level with Sox and see at what point their ears/brain blocks out the signal (it's actually quite high especially when the tracks have very little "silence" in them). I'm very much a computer/audio geek and love my expensive toys, and love to research about creating the perfect power supplies etc, but in the end there is a point at which our brains cannot tell a difference, so the rest is there to stroke our egos and desire for "perfection". I also love the concept of Audirvana+ and would develop my own player in much the same way, but again here I'm just trying to (a) verify whether the "upgrade" to Audirvana from a basic player like iTunes is worth it, and (b) point out a few issues I discovered to see why no one else has brought this up and what concerns people have.

Thanks I will evaluate that release and see if it resolves my concerns. There have been a few comments made recently that there is a noticeable difference with the Beta, so I can keep my hopes up for now. Roch, would you not be concerned to hear audible artifacts when playing those files? Have you even tried them to hear for yourself? I don't give a damn about Xiph etc, I just want to keep away from the audio voodoo that goes on around here. Believe me when I first tried A+ I could swear I could hear a difference when integer/direct mode was enabled. Then I closed my eyes and "randomly" started playing with the enabling button, and suddenly I could not hear a difference. So try as I might I was still fooling myself into hearing a difference that wasn't there.

I had only played around with the original version of Audirvana, but when I recently picked up a Denon AH-D600 headphone and Audio-GD 11.32 DAC+headphone amp I decided to try out the latest official version. Frankly, on my various Macs I cannot hear the difference between Direct Mode, Integer Mode, iTunes, nor taking a high sample rate file and comparing it with a Sox downsampled version. Well my hearing appears to be ok as I can hear down to 10Hz and up to almost 21kHz through the headphones. In any case, my real issue came when I tried taking certain test files and playing them through Audirvana. In particular, the "Intermod Test" files from the 24/192 Music Downloads are Very Silly Indeed article. The two warbling tone files on the original version of Audirvana were a disaster, basically showing artifacts at near full volume in the audible frequency range (oops!). Try it out so you know what I'm talking about. I thought this bug had to be fixed in the official release, but no it's still there, only down around -60db to -80db. Has anyone else tried and noticed this? These files play just fine with iTunes (in other words you cannot hear anything). What about the latest Beta version? Is this issue resolved?