Very pleased with Audirvana performance, however, I have noticed that the playback quality of identical files varies considerably, depending on whether they are being played singly (no other files in the Audirvana playlist) or as part of a larger playlist, e.g. an album.
I am currently running an early-2009 iMac (Core 2 Duo 2.66GHz, OS X 10.7 Lion, 8GB RAM, nVidia GeForce 9400m).
I plan to build a Mac Pro to support Audirvana optimally and have some questions re specs:
1)
Does Audirvana make use of any libraries or OS APIs (e.g. OpenCL, GCD etc…) which would be best served by a particular spec? For example, if OpenCL is used, a machine with a dedicated GPU would be desirable.
2)
What hardware resources have the most impact on Audirvana operation? For example, how RAM intensive is it? Does it operate better with more CPU cores? Would there be a noticeable performance difference between DDR2 & DDR3 memory?
3)
Is there an optimal version of the Mac OS to target? An older version will place less load on the rest of the system, but might not offer optimal API support for the application. This will be a dedicated machine, so compatibility with other software is not important.
