I am quite happy with the sonic performance of the Studio trial via my M1 Mac mini, and have only a few quibbles about the design. I agree with the sentiment that the type is too small. Also, while Audirvana 3.5 allows you to highlight a local album track and see its disc location, I have yet to find that feature in Studio.
Finally, a larger annoyance, Studio grey’s out the “Delete” button in album view, but allows it in track view. This is a problem, because Studio still has 3.5’s difficulties with some of my multi-disc SACD DSF files and creates multiple track entries in album view. In Studio I have to go to track-view to delete the spurious tracks, but track view is very dense and scroll-intensive, without any new obvious search features for explicit tracks, unless I am missing something. If so I hope somebody will tell me.
Studio has the stated purpose of adding library management features to 3.5. I believe we need to see more. I understand much effort appears to have been put into managing streaming, but I am anti-streaming. I will not support streaming until all streaming systems find a better means to fairly compensate artists, and until then I will content myself with listening only to purchased product in my own library. As such I will be focused on how well Studio helps me manage that library. The question all trial users will face at the end of the trial is wether we see value in the product equal to the yearly fee.
RGL