rjalexander

Thanks Musicophile. Would option 4 mangle the bitperfectness of my audio stream or otherwise introduce latency/delays/glitches in the playback ?

I am fascinated by the threads I'm reading here :-) Being a total neophyte I getting a bit lost though. I am looking for a simplified "schematics" of the components that is in between my audio files and my eardrum :-) Googled to no avail. Can you please correct / destroy and rebuild the chain I'm trying to depict hereunder ? audio file -> player -> codec -> mixer -> device driver -> DAC -> Amp -> speakers/headphones -> earwax :-) -> eardrum (rest is anatomy but I'm ok with that) :-) If the above is true would the following example in my system be correct ? song.flac -> Decibel -> codec built in Decibel ? -> ??? -> CoreAudio ? -> ODAC -> O2 -> Sennheiser HD600 Thanks and please don't blast me too hard for my ignorance :-)

Thanks DigiPete ! I thought I have been as detailed as possible ... :-) So if I understand your suggestion I should convert all my FLACs to ALACs (OMG) and that would make them "visible" to iTunes for its "management" functions while the "helpers" you mention would actually help in reproducing a bitperfect stream. I'm a bit scared by the tought of converting all to ALAC as my lossless standard since to my limited knowledge it is not as widely supported on players and other devices as FLAC is, and I would like to be able to switch to other music storage and reproduction hardware and other operating systems in the future.

Dear friends, I really hope some experienced user might be so kind to bear with my description and help me find a solution and sorry for my nonperfect english. I have a largish collection of mostly classical music which is 80% FLAC (mostly 16bit, some 24) and the rest various MP3 (from 320 to 192) residing on my Late 2010 27" iMac to which I have the JDS Lab O2+ODAC combo connected via USB to which I have my Sennheiser HD600 old but trusted headphones. I am struggling to find a good player to match all of my requirements. I think I need to rule out iTunes because of the large FLAC collection I have I have tried Decibel and Audirvana trials and love the playback quality and filetype support but they lack my "music management" features I need, which are: Rating (I like rating my music both album-wise and for non classical music also track-wise) metadata queries (on at least author, genre or other tags I used) Playlists (in Foobar and Mediamnky on windows I used both static and dynamic playlists the latter via metadata queries). So far on my Mac I have either iTunes which is feature rich but does not support FLAC or Decibel/Audirvana like programs which sound great but have no management features (to my knowledge). Thanks for any inisght / suggestions. PS The Audirvana trial I liked very much but must be using it in the wrong way since when I start each track I see the source being 16/96 and the DAC being 24/96 and taking a whole second or two to switch to 16/96 before it starts playing plus quite a few times stopping playback after a few seconds with Starting and Stopping Audio interface massages (going from memory since am writing from away from home).