I have been using Audirvana since the very beginning, and I am a paying customer.
The sound quality (SQ) has always been the main reason I havenāt switched to other players. Iāve tried ROON and othersāthey are good, but their sound quality does not compare to Audirvana.
Over the past few days, I experimented with a new player (BlueSound Node 2i), which I connected digitally to my Lyngdorf 1120 amplifier. While the sound was decent, it didnāt feel exceptional. After using it for a couple of days, I kept wondering: Am I missing something? Am I losing details in the music?
Then I switched back to Audirvana, and WOW! The details and brilliance of the music immediately came back. For instance, the background male vocals in Kari Bremnesā Fyret Ved Tornehavn were once again clearly present. Cecilie Norbyās version of Black Hole Sun, where she dubs her own voice, became distinctly audible. Fabio Biondiās strings moved to the forefront of the soundstage, instead of being hidden somewhere in the mix.
I think Audirvana sounds very good. I have no experience with Roon so canāt say if it sounds better than Roon or not.
My question (and Iām being sincere here, not trying to stir the pot or anything like that), is why should it sound better? Iām not using upsampling, not using volume leveling or software volume control, going direct exclusive USB output to the DAC. In theory, Audirvana is just sending bits untouched to the DAC. Why should it sound any different than other players that can be made to do the same?
Iāve heard other people say Audirvana sounds the best. I donāt have reasons to contradict this, but Iād like to know reasons to support it. Because as you know, thereās a lot of subjectivity and confirmation bias in audio
Well, I think the best explanation could come from the devs at AudirvÄna.
The way AudirvÄna bypasses the standard audio drivers in the computer, uses the RAM for buffering (and making no use of the hard disk), minimises other processes in the computer and therefore allows the CPU to process only the audio signal and thus minimises noise and jitter is the best way I can describe it.
Just an observation: JRiver can also play from RAM. But I didnāt notice any difference in JRiver SQ if I set it to play from RAM or not. I can say also Audirvana sounds best, but Iām not sure if playing from RAM is the key to success or most probabily other elements.
I also doubt the disk aspect. I have a cheap $20 Walmart box that streams 4K high bitrate HEVC videos from a network spinning drive without any visible hiccups. In my particular case, reading and decoding audio from an attached SSD is so trivial for my M1 Mac mini, it can hardly matter whether you buffer the entire song or 10 secs.
Itās not all about playback pre-load bufferingā¦ Nothing is decoded at the SSDā¦ the encoded digital-audio signal ones and zeros (1ās and 0ās) stored on the physical media are read and interpolated as analog voltages of varying amplitudes and durationā¦ What will matter the most is how much System RAM is available for all CPU System operation registers/accumulators and memory bus bandwidth demands and related interrupt latencies and transfer rateā¦ You can certainly have a slow storage device with a large playback buffer if you have enough System RAM to support all CPU operations and calculation accumulators, however there will be a limiting point as playback is relatively āreal-timeāā¦ It is all about eliminating all sources of noise potentials on the digital-audio signal on its way to the output bus controller.
