I have been following the sound quality / soundstage threads ever since Studio came out. Im a 3.5 user and use it on Mac Catalina - its an old mac and will need replaced soon. Dreading it as I generally like the sound I’m getting although I find that I need to use the free SONEQ to adapt my sytem to get the sound I want in my room. It’s more or less a set and forget but one of the things I need is to enhance the 177 hz mid and the 6Khz upper to get close to the sound I want.
I listened to so many so called HI-fi systems and speakers before I settled on what I have and so many of them are high frequency challenged! They seem to be afraid to make classical and early music sound like it really is - almost like people have become offended by real sound and all the detail and roughness in it. If you are up close to a big harpsichord or a pipe organ there is so much detail and very high frequency harmonics. So many systems are just incapable of producing this.
So coming back to Audirvana - I’m not doing any upsampling (i’m feeding from Qobuz by USB into a Chord DAC) as I don’t like the change in sound that results from this (the upsampling). The thoughts of having to go to a soundstage that sounds like it produces a sound that is less high freq intensive, seems like a step back to me. Thats what has been said generally in the majority of the comments from the start and not just this thread.
Dreading I will be forced onto a new product that doesn’t sound the same as the current one - that would be a real problem. Like ingadc - would love a ‘switch’ to make it sound the same as 3.5.
Dear ingadc,
I must second your description of the difference, and have so commented when AS was still new. I highly recommend the comments of Alec Kinnear on the following linked page, which greatly help to explain the in-built tweaks of the original Audirvana (which I have used from 1.4 to 3.5):
It would seem that the original Audirvana had a ‘sweetened’ sound, and was not ‘bit-perfect’. It remains to be seen whether Studio is ‘bit-perfect’, and this is the source of the difference, or whether as you suggest it is sweetened in a different way, in the lower frequencies.
Well, Damien, consider yourself asked! I also want to know: is the difference between Classic and Studio between DSP and bit-perfect, or two different kinds of DSP, one meant for speakers and the other more for headphones? Can you please include all three presets, as requested—including bit-perfect, which would leave all autrechoses to the user’s AU plugins?
I don’t understand why you care about “bit perfect”. I care just about sound quality and stability. After many tests with my budget but good for me system I found the best settings for me, my room, my ears, my equipement; as, ks, no upsampling just DoP 1.1, low buffer and 3 DSP from Goodhertz setup as someone wrote up (177/6k) plus other few adjustments. The source and the target are the same (what’s displayed on left and right on AS). Is bit perfect? Who cares? Sounds good for me? Yes. Is stable? Except few bugs like crashing when playing some podcasts yes. So I will stay with AS at least until I will found a better solution. And I like the interface (with big fonts). Now back to music. I think this discussion or similar will never end.
We have been through this discussion few times before.
I also do not believe that either AS or A3.5 are playing the source material bit perfect as they both sound different from each other and from other players.
Damien authored a white paper you might be able to find, called “Beyond Bit Perfect,” about techniques to make bit perfect files sound better. So a difference in sound may not necessarily indicate changes in bits, at least if you credit Damien’s discussion in the white paper. (If you don’t, that’s fine. My intent is not to engage in an argument, but simply to raise other possibilities that people may evaluate for themselves.)
I read that white paper.
If you do as well you would see that he talks about his player optimizing the audio playback by loading the data then playing from memory, utilizing integer mode and exclusive access.
Which is all great, but on its own doesn’t explain the difference in sound signature.
There are differences in sound between players in bit-perfect mode. This difference does not mean forcefully that the playback is not bit-perfect. Or in other words, that the player adds or removes bits from the original track.
A case that makes it more obvious is when you use a streamer. In this case, the player on the server only decodes the track, while the player on the streamer renders.
If you compare Audirvana, Foobar, JRiever, Neutron, MConnect, etc… You’ll hear that they sound different, though they are just decoding the track in UPNP rendering. The reason for this difference is that they don’t use the same codes, and some players have better codes than others.
In this regard, Audirvana is very good, but not the best.
That removes all doubt. That always sounds good as long as the blue LED is on.
But that bread is still like the baker’s intention? And yet a blue LED…