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. Everything I tried was available via UPnP without being converted. Analog was capped at 24/96 by the mini and of course HDMI was at 24/48. I'll forgive them and be patient because the music just sounds so damn good. They are a bit buggy and slow and just a pain in the ass at times. The real losers are the software and control apps themselves. The real winner here is using UPnP via ethernet or wireless ax. 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. 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. Apple famously likes converting everything to 24/48 and I'm inclined to agree now that Airplay 2 is doing so as well. The biggest issue when using Audirvana with a Mac mini connected to an AVR is the audio output via HDMI. 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. There really was an audible difference to the sound between the services. 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. Qobuz tracks through Audirvana smoked the Deezer tracks. 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. 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.Īnyway, started a free trial of Deezer lossless since my Onkyo has a built in app for it. Unfortunately, Apple no longer includes an optical output port on the mini. 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. Audirvana will detail the abilities of the connected device's DAC. The biggest issue of all was audio output and I'm calling out Apple on this one which seems to happen often this days. 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. I might get Tidal again at 3 bucks for 3 months through Bestbuy just for more comparisons. 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. Because it is a new version, I was still able to get a 30 day trial to check it out. The newly revamped control app showed up on Monday so I decided to give Audirvana another try. As well as the look, they have ditched the old purchase model and are now a $5.99 per month service. Audirvana has now ditched it's old look and come up with Audirvana Studio. It worked well enough but I had issues I didn't quite understand at the time. Anyway, tried Audirvana 3.5 and then let it go. I think you can go to preferences in either and set volume control to be software controlled, but I could be wrong.Ok, so no love for Audirvana around here it seems. In contrast Roon has crashed on me once and this happen after I left it running for over 24 hours by mistake.Ĭost wise there is not much difference between the two now about £3 I think. With respect to reliability, Audirvana since it recent updates and move to its Studio version seems to be less stable and it has crashed several times. I have come to the conclusion that using both with Qobuz or listening to CD quality or higher FLAC from my NAS Drive there is very little difference in SQ, it is important to ensure that both are running with no enhancements or upscaling to compare like for like.įrom a usability point of view then I consider Roon to be generally the better of the two, it is also rather nice when you you have got to the end of the current play list it then continues selecting music based on you previous listening, I have come across some rather good new music through this. Yes, I have used both a reasonable amount, with a RPI/HifiBerry Digione and also Microrendu.
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