Ok, so no love for Audirvana around here it seems. Roon people.
Anyway, tried Audirvana 3.5 and then let it go. It worked well enough but I had issues I didn't quite understand at the time. Audirvana has now ditched it's old look and come up with Audirvana Studio. As well as the look, they have ditched the old purchase model and are now a $5.99 per month service. The newly revamped control app showed up on Monday so I decided to give Audirvana another try. Because it is a new version, I was still able to get a 30 day trial to check it out. I'd already used up a free trial of Qobuz and went ahead and paid for a month of it at $14.99 which isn't terrible as every other service I am currently using is free right now. I might get Tidal again at 3 bucks for 3 months through Bestbuy just for more comparisons.
Of course, results will very depending on one's hardware but I did have some issues as the look and feel have changed and it took a bit of time to get familiar with it all. The biggest issue of all was audio output and I'm calling out Apple on this one which seems to happen often this days. Audirvana will detail the abilities of the connected device's DAC. So, I can see what is supported from the HDMI connection, the 3.5mm headphone jack and UPnP via ethernet using a Mac mini M1. Unfortunately, Apple no longer includes an optical output port on the mini. I have mine connected to my Onkyo receiver using both HDMI and a 3.5mm to RCA analog cable connected from the headphone jack of the mini just to see what would be sent out without a little external DAC in the chain.
Anyway, started a free trial of Deezer lossless since my Onkyo has a built in app for it. I prefer using any built-in app and I like the choice of using a control app or the actual remote control for the receiver. Qobuz tracks through Audirvana smoked the Deezer tracks. It didn't matter if the numbers came up 16/44.1 or 24/192 on Qobuz and I'm sure some of you aren't surprised.
There really was an audible difference to the sound between the services. Deezer didn't sound bad at all and it was only after playing a selected track using Deezer and then using Qobuz via Audirvana that I noticed an improvement to the sound.
The biggest issue when using Audirvana with a Mac mini connected to an AVR is the audio output via HDMI. Apple famously likes converting everything to 24/48 and I'm inclined to agree now that Airplay 2 is doing so as well. This was a headache when trying to figure out why 16/44.1 tracks played back too quickly and 24/192 tracks came over at a snail's pace. Remember taking your finger as a kid and speeding up or slowing down a record on the turntable for laughs? When outputting audio over HDMI, one MUST set upsampling within Audirvana from "Deactivated" to "Device maximum frequency." This results in the Mac mini sending everything out in 24/48 and everything plays at the proper speed. It sounds good once adjusted.
The real winner here is using UPnP via ethernet or wireless ax. It just sounds great. The real losers are the software and control apps themselves. They are a bit buggy and slow and just a pain in the ass at times. I'll forgive them and be patient because the music just sounds so damn good. Analog was capped at 24/96 by the mini and of course HDMI was at 24/48. Everything I tried was available via UPnP without being converted. There's much more to it and I'm hardly an expert but like many just want to play music without too much fuss and have it sound great. Installing and setting up Audirvana Studio can be a fuss and it needs some tweaks but it is another option for those who want to bundle streaming services, internet radio and ripped libraries and have access to them via a control app. Some might say it is worth a monthly cost of $5.99 while others would disagree. Again, results will vary with different pieces of hardware. I'll play with it for the month and see how I feel about it at the end. Say, anybody know what happened to
@VMPS-TIII? It's his thread, after all.
