bikeman

Did you guys see this MQA: Benefits and Costs from Stereophile?! Its the most balanced MQA article I've seen so far from the mainstream audiophile press. Apologies if this has been mentioned before.

Interesting. I've used both 9018 and 9038 based DACs and didn't find any glare.

I would like to discuss a UX design issue. Almost every audio software player I've used (e.g., Plex, Spotify, etc.) provides track controls (pause, seek, prev/next track) as soon as you initiate playback. It is handy to have pause immediately available if needed. However, A+ Remote does not. On the iPad it takes one extra click on the "Playing" icon to get to the track controls. On the iPhone it takes two clicks. Damien, what do you think?

I can confirm that 2.2.0.2 fixes the wake and stay awake issues.

That only changes the thumbnail size. I want to be able to hide the details pane on the right so that the full screen is available for thumbnails (just like it works on the A+ player).` Hmm...turns out the iPad issue was only on iOS 9 Beta (which is probably buggy). I reverted to iOS 8.4 and the details pane doesn't automatically resize willy nilly. But it would still be nice if A+ remote behaved just like A+ Player wrt. the thumbnail view.

I am having somewhat related issues. When I start A+ Remote, it does wake up the MacMini, but sometimes the screen is stuck at "Connecting...". If I kill and restart A+ Remote, it instantly connects. The second problem is that A+ Player/Remote does NOT keep my MacMini alive even with music playing - it goes to sleep in 45 seconds causing the music to stop! As soon as I wake up the Mac via different means (e.g., VNC), the music springs to life! The workaround I have is to keep an active VNC session from my iPad/iPhone to the MacMini. Finally, I am seeing an issue with the album view on the iPad. I can't seem to find a way to fill the whole screen with album thumbnails - there is always a detail pane on the right in landscape mode. When the rotate the iPad from landscape to portrait and back, the detail pane becomes bigger, reducing the number of album thumbnails displayed.

Smartphone/Tablet apps such as "Decibel 10th" that use the built-in mic. I suspect they are not as accurate as dedicated devices such as the Radio Shack SPL meter in terms of absolute values, but I'm guessing they provide a reasonably good indication of relative values.

Fair enough. So, reproducing 10dB louder requires your amp to produce 10 times as much power (and your speakers to reproduce it), but subjectively sounds only twice as loud! I think this is why my system sounds better at night (25dB room noise floor compared to 35dB during daytime). I don't have to turn up the volume as much and this puts less demands on my amp/speaker, not to mention to the room itself. I used think "cleaner" AC power at night was the reason for better sound, but now I think it is really the lowered noise floor.

Hmm...I thought approximately every 3dB is a doubling of loudness. 10dB = 1B which is actually 10 to the power of 1. So 10dB is 10 times louder.

Not sure if this helps, but thought I'd share my dropout story. I have a 2014 Mac Mini 2.5GHz, 8 GB RAM, 256gb SSD, running Yosemite, connected via USB to a Wyred 4 Sound DAC-2 DSD-SE. Playback is via Audirvana Plus 2 in Direct Mode. It functions flawlessly up to 192kHz. However, if I play a 384 or 352.8 kHz track (either native or upsampled frequency), it will occasionally fail to lock on to the USB signal resulting in continuous dropouts and usually corrects itself after say 20 or 30 seconds. Also, I get the occasional fraction of a second dropout. Once again, no problems as long as the DAC is fed 192kHz or lower frequency. I also experienced the same problem when using the same DAC with a late 2013 Macbook Pro running Mavericks.