Hello,
Newbie here and to streaming world too. After exploring various options, I decided to give try Audirvana and see if it suits me. I am coming from Foobar2000 with Eole skin theme background. I have digitized my CDs and SACDs to FLAC and DSF files a couple of months back.
So I renewed an old Asus K52F laptop by upgrading to 8GB RAM and 1TB Samsung SSD drive. The Windows 10 and music files are on the same drive. Been using Foobar2000 and the Monkeymote app on a iPad mini 2 to remotely connect the laptop. The laptop is connected to an Oppo UDP-205 using a USB cable. Internet speed is 100Mbps - all wireless connections.
But I have some issues that is scaring me away from Audirvana. Below are the issues:
- When switching from FLAC to DSD files (or vice versa), there are 2 loud popping noise. This scared me to death as I cannot afford to loose the drivers on my precious ProAc D48Rs. Scared so much that I did not use Audirvana for the next 3-4 days.
- The Audirvana app on iPad takes it’s own sweet time to load the album covers. If you do not wait patiently for 2-3 mins, you can see the covers and album names mismatched.
- Audirvana itself takes a bit long to load on the laptop, along with the album covers
- The interface on the laptop leaves a bit to be desired, particularly after experiencing the Eole skin. The Audirvana layout is very similar to the Eole and I wish Audirvana provides the ability to “size” the album art.
- Also many times I found that the ipad app would not recognize my laptop. In such cases, I closed the laptop Audirvana, started the ipad app first and then started the laptop app. With this SOP, the ipad app recognizes the laptop without any issues.
- Would love to stream Spotify through Audirvana. This seems to be missing. Yeah, I tried Tidal and Qobuz and without an iota of doubt, they are in a different league than Spotify. But being a family guy, I cannot ignore the kids and wife and we are on the family plan. Besides that, the music I find on Spotify is missing on Qobuz. Also the Spotify “recommendations” are miles ahead of Tidal/Qobuz.
The feature that I was thrilled was that last night I was able to connect “wirelessly” from the laptop to the Oppo and the sound quality was very very good. One point to note was that, when I had connected the laptop to the Oppo using USB, on the same songs I was setting my sound to 9 o’clock position. But when connected wirelessly, I was able to take the volume up to 10 o’clock. So not sure why the difference. Also I had distortions when I upsampled FLACs to DSD 64. But it was gone when I disabled upsampling. The distortion happened only when wirelessly connected, and not through USB.
It was the wireless feature that made me sign up here and try to figure out the issue rather than loose hope on Audirvana.
Can someone please help me on what settings I must be doing to get rid of the loud pops and distortion?
Thanks!
