It looks like there are many Audirvana users here who are very dissatisfied with the new business model. It seems that Audirvana is risking a massive loss of trust from its regular customers. I am also very disappointed and would like to explain this here in more detail.
I chose Audirvana 7 years ago for the following reasons:
1. Audirvana was one of the few applications that offered the quality features that critical and analytical listeners place special value on, and at a comparably low price.
2. Audirvana was specifically geared towards the needs of this audiophile audience and not towards mass consumption and mainstream.
3. Audirvana was and is not only an excellent software audio player for high-resolution audio files including multichannel and gapless support as well as loudness normalization, but also offers powerful management functions for your own music collection with support for complex metadata.
4. The support of plug-ins, for example for stereo or surround to binaural converters, head trackers, correction filters, etc. was also an important reason for my decision. (In the meantime this also works with "SoundSource" under macOS)
All of this had strengthened my confidence in Audirvana. In my opinion, the peculiarities of audiophile listeners are an intimate relationship with predominantly acoustic music. Maximum musical enjoyment not only requires the highest technical quality, but is also a special challenge for musicians, producers and listeners:
1. Musical excellence can be found less often in mainstream productions because they are oriented towards quick profit,
2. Acoustically generated music is many times more complex than electronically generated music. This mainly results from the physical characteristics of the solid-state acoustics of acoustic instruments. Many properties and effects of solid-state acoustics, such as shear stresses, direction and frequency-dependent speed of sound, various types of vibration and waves, non-linear dynamics and other features offer far more degrees of freedom and dimensions of sound generation than one-dimensional electronic sound generation
3. Therefore, making virtuoso music is more difficult and requires more mastery and practice on the part of the musicians than with purely electronic sound production or heavily post-processed music
4. the acoustic generation of sound enables a greater and more nuanced variety, a stronger as well as more subtle expressiveness and a stronger conveyance of liveliness and emotionality
5. However, in addition to holistic emotional listening, it also requires attentive, focused, i.e. analytical listening. This requires the best listening conditions and wants to be learned
6. It is the direct acoustic interaction of the musicians with one another, with the audience, with the acoustics of the room, i.e. the live character, that makes music come alive, enables emotional resonance and creates authenticity.
7. Finally, the interplay of listener expectation, subtle phrasing, accents and moments of tension, the situational context and background knowledge are also components and prerequisites for enjoying music.
All of this leads to a different way of hearing. It requires leisure and almost ritual attunement and an exclusive focus on the music. This works best if you are the only listener and at the main listening point (MLP / sweetspot), because all recordings are made for this point and only there is it possible to tap into the complexity of the content and the spatiotemporal resolution as purely as possible. This is something completely different from a more or less passive (externally determined) mass consumption. Audiophiles want maximum control over the “what and how”, “when and where”. You therefore often have your own larger collection of outstanding recordings including related information that can be enjoyed undisturbed at the right time in a suitable place. It often is uniquely successful events and recordings of lasting value. One can say that such musical treasures are part of a timeless cultural asset. They often offer a complexity and variety that can be rediscovered again and again and different.
Of course, audiophile listeners are not always in the mode of active, analytical listening, because every ability to concentrate has its limits. You also hear emotionally holistically and perhaps also predominantly. What I want to say here is that different types of listening can be mutually exclusive and also have opposing requirements that are not always compatible with one another. Such an essential contrast is, for example, that audiophile listeners want exclusive availability of media and transmission channels, including software usage rights, and the mainstream also accepts shared media technologies and subscription models. The latter have a fundamental bandwidth problem:
1. the shared media, which requires the individual user lossy encoding and
2. that of the limited total capacity with an increasing number of users
My fear is that Audirvana Studio will be puffed up into an egg-laying woolly milk sow if it goes mainstream. This is also at the expense of simple, intuitive and consistent usability. For me, streaming is superfluous and combining a large number of my own HighResAudio files with streaming offers is an annoying ballast. I use these extensions do not want and do not want the additional costs and reject a subscription model from!
For me lossy audio content (incl. MQA), streaming and Internet radio are more suited for single, casual use. The interface to HighResAudio download services can, however, be a useful facility, either as access to your own downloads or to discover new things.
I fear that the now chosen path of Audirvana
1. the turn to the mainstream follows a profit logic that sets in motion a momentum of its own that erodes the original ambitions and the demands of the audiophile listener lose importance
2. the subscription model requires a leap of faith in future services with possibly useless features that I do not want to finance
In any case, the subscription model is not a trust-building measure, but the opposite.
If Audirvana has no other option for economic reasons, I suggest reconsidering the strategic decisions and better pursuing a modular approach, e.g. using a modular software architecture with
• High-end audio player including remote apps (iOS, Android, macOS and Win server client) with an exclusive software license.
• Content manager with exclusive software license.
• Add-on for your own streaming server with LAN, WLAN, USB, HDMI, DLNA and HighResAudio as well as multichannel support (optional upgrade license to macOS, Windows, Linux, NAS) with exclusive software license and Remote app as a user interface.
• Streaming add-on (upgrade license, optionally with an exclusive SW license or subscription license for everything).
That would be acceptable to me.
I hope you can agree with me and Audirvana hears the voices.