For instance, if money were no object, I would get Fidelia with the FHX add-on just so I can have its crossfeed controls, or the Amarra player just for the brilliantly executed EQ controls. With some of the players, the additional functions you get are so good that they justify having the application for those functions alone, apart from the sound quality aspect (though you still need to consider if it’s worth to pay the price just to have those functions). Please also note that the same function may be worded differently on different players, but in essence they do the same thing (i.e device hog mode, exclusive access mode are essentially the same thing). Some of the functions provided by these players yield bigger improvements (iZotope over Apple CoreAudio upsampling, device hog mode), but some others like dither settings are less so (to be frank I didn’t spend too much time experimenting with dither settings as I find their effects to be extremely subtle to my ears). The reality is that in every genre you’re bound to find more bad recordings than good ones, so it’s a good idea to know where in the quality scale most of your music stands. In fact, until you’ve learned to distinguish a good recording quality from a bad, I would advise against spending big money for a high quality audio player. Therefore a good recording stored as an MP3 and played in Itunes would still sound better than a 500 Megabytes, 24/384 WAV file of a crappy recording played in any of these audiophile players. However, when I am playing music on my Fiio E17 desktop system, reviewing some $100 headphone, I probably won’t be so critical of what player I’m using, though again I still like to use BitPerfect for those occasions.Īnother aspect that you need to realize is that the quality of the recording is always the most important aspect of any Hi-Fi system. It’s like having used bad quality gasoline for your Lamborghini Aventador LP 700-4. This is why the pricing of the players is going to be a big part of the decision.įor me, whenever I listen to a high end system, either for personal listening or for a review, I simply can’t go back to using standard Itunes. Undoubtedly the hardware quality is more important than the software, so a $300 DAC is still going to be better than a typical $100 DAC despite the player used on the computer. One thing I need to state before going to the reviews is that the sonic improvements that you’ll get from these audio players are very subtle. Of course the whole “Is it worth the money?” question is going to be the first thing people ask. Any distortion created at this level is going to be passed on to the subsequent components on the system, and so it’s very important to get things right. True to the “garbage-in garbage-out” principle, the app you choose for music playback represents an important part of the “source”. I have had the chance to use these players with some very high end equipment and indeed the improvements I get from these players are good enough to warrant the purchase. Appendix: The Concept Of Neutrality –.I’ll start with the table of contents for those of you who want to skip a section or two. There are a lot of things I missed in terms of covering each player in detail, but if you’d post it on the comments section I will try to fill them in. Anyway I hope you guys will find this to be helpful. I realize that despite clocking in over 7,000 words, the article is far from perfect, but it’s been a crazy few months keep so finally I decide to publish this article and get on with working on more normal reviews. Many of these players offer such a rich level of control and customization, and it is beyond the scope of this review to try to cover every single function offered by each player. After I started working on this article, I realized that it’s quite a crazy project to take on, but I realize that if I only did a comparative of three different products then it’s only a matter of time before someone come and ask “how does this compare to that?”. Comparative reviews are always difficult to do, especially when you have more than five different products in one article. In total, I’ve tested a total of nine players: three from Sonic Studio (Amarra, MINI, and Junior), Audirvana and Audirvana+, Pure Music, Fidelia, Decibel, and BitPerfect. The last few months, I’ve tried and tested the majority of available audio players for OS X.
#Audirvana izotope settings mac
Even though Windows users still represent a big part of Headfonia readers, I choose to focus on OS X for now because it’s easier to do as I use Mac myself, but also because for most developers, OS X seems to be the platform of choice when it comes to high quality audio playback.
#Audirvana izotope settings mac os x
Sometime in 2011 I began thinking about the possibility of doing a review on high quality audio players for the Mac OS X operating system.
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