I have been a long-term A+ 3.5 user and decided to go with a 1-year AS subscription today. After a few questions that @Antoine kindly answered, I installed AS and it copied almost my entire A+ 3.5 configuration over automatically, including Plugin data.
The analysis of my local library took a few hours. To my satisfaction, my local music files don’t appear to be ‘touched’ as far as I can see.
The only information I had to enter was my TIDAL credentials.
I’m still exploring the UI, features and functions and I imagine I may run into issues over the coming days. However, it has been a positive experience for me. Perceptually, the sound quality of AS out-of-the-box seems slightly better to be. I still have A+ 3.5 to A/B test AS against.
In particular, the addition of Internet radios and podcasts is most welcome.
So far, I would like to say thank you to Damien and the team at Audirvana for providing a positive upgrade experience. I weighed up Audirvana against Roon and decided to stay with Audirvana.
It’s good that you post this. An outsider can say “oh, audirvana, no way! look at this forum, only problems!”. I apreciate Audirvana and use almost daily from the time when I discovered and I had very little problems. The fact that Damien don’t delete negative posts it’s very good, actually when I find a site with “oh, this program changes my life”, “the only software that touch your ears” blah blah blah and no negative feedback I run from there and never return.
I only subscribed to AS today. I have A+ 3.5 and I am hearing a noticeable increase in sound quality with AS. I cannot compare AS V1.6.1 with previous versions of AS.
Hi Doudou, I hope you’re well .
To be honest, I’ve never been disappointed with the SQ of Studio (or 3.5 for that matter).
My main problem has been with reliability, especially the remote, and this appears to have been addressed incrementaly and successfully with each new release.
However I only stream using UPnP, with no upsampling or filters, so rely more on the sound quality of my streamer/DAC as opposed to Studio.
Do you stream wired (USB) or UPnP?
At the moment my streamer only allows for UPnP (Cyrus), but I’m considering buying a new streamer /DAC soon, so would be interested in knowing whether either solution offers better sound quality.
At the moment I’m only playing back local files on my computer and TIDAL with AS with a USB connection to my external DAC. However, I do intend to try out UPnP soon.
Nothing visibly (with regard to the remote) or audibly has changed in my opinion, although I’ve yet to experience a crash on my NUC.
Of course, this may change tomorrow
I first posted my experiences with Audirvana Studio 15 days ago. Since then I have been listening to my music (local and streamed) for a lot of hours through AS.
The sound quality is amazing. I do have a fairly good audio system so that helps.
Things I like:
TIDAL streaming quality
Sound tuning options available
Hi-Res track analysis
Radios and Podcasts
High Quality radio stations
Things that could be improved:
Better TIDAL integration (e.g. My Daily Discovery, Mixes & Radio)
Ability to add your own radio stations
Ability to use larger font sizes
Anyway, so far AS is an excellent choice for music playback.
That’s what I say. AS is possibly the best choice for people who stream and for radio lovers. It needs to be improved for people who listen to their own music.
I disagree with that as I mostly use it to play from my local library. Occasionally I would subscribe to Qobuz and Tidal but I mostly play my local ripped content and hi-res files I purchased.
Your use case is an edge case. If you mostly into classical music you might have some limitations (multiple value attributes and such) and indeed this can be improved. But if you mostly have pop/rock content in your library it works pretty well.
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