Audirvana Origin supports iFi Audio Valkyrie recently. I am glad for it. However, there is a serious problem about bass.
When turn on Xbass of iFi Audio Valkyrie, the bass of music sounds terrible. The bass sounds crashed. If you turn off Xbass, the bass of music becomes normal, but the bass
effects decreased. I compared several Flac Hi-Res music or songs with my another music player app HQ Player, which has no the problem. I think Audirvana hasn’t optimised the driver for iFi Audio Valkyrie.
I am pretty sure that is the feature XBass on the iFi device that is to blame. Audirvana doesn’t optimise drivers for any device, since it doesn’t make any.
I have an iFi ZEN. the XBass button on my ZEN makes the bass sound terrible also. It does not matter if I use Audirvana, Foobar, JRiver or any other music player. As @jmtennapel already mentioned: Audirvana has nothing to do with this. Blame the ‘XBass’ option on the iFi which simply gives a very unnatural bad sounding boost to the bass.
iFi’s ‘XBass’ feature is not the same across each device they have, annoyingly. I have the Zen Air DAC and Zen Air Can (headphone amp) and the DAC increases the bass noticeably more (too much) compared to the headphone amp, even though they’re supposed to be part of the same ‘series’.
I decreased the volume of Valkyrie, the bass is sounded better. I set the volume at max. I forgot saying I connect Valkyrie to Brise Audio Tsuranagi-SC. Thanks
My opinion is the X-Bass processing is designed for ear-phones, IEMs and desktop speakers… Otherwise, using plug-in DSP processing will be more effective.