Audirvana Plus and Izotope SRC

matbhuvi

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I have been using JRiver on my Windows 7 PC for quite sometime now. For portable use, i was looking for a suitable software for my Mac. I was seriously considering upgrading my JRiver licence for Mac as well. But, most of the online reviews suggested Audirvana Plus and Pure Music over JRiver. Now, i am using Audirvana Plus for about 2 weeks now. What i find more interesting in Audirvana Plus is the advanced filter options for Sample Rate conversion with Izotope 64 bit SRC. The Parameters are steepness, Filter max length, Cut off freq, Anti aliasing, Pre-ringing. You can read more about it in the above link. I started playing around with only today, and already noticed percievable difference. Note that, it is done on digital signal. There is no EQ involved (which i don't prefer). The result is really positive. There is quite a bit of reading involved.

--> White paper on digital filter -> Ayre

--> An interesting thread in computer audiophile

There is a difference in staging, airiness / smoothness based on the tuning..I would like to point to a particular post for reference..

These are some of the components that i thought we could never change in a system without change in hardware. Personally, i find this very exiting to play around with the settings. Unlike EQ, the results seem to be more natural and coherent. In fact, i hate doing any sort of EQ.

If you are using Mac, i would highly recommend Audirvana Plus.
 
I downloaded Izotope RX4 and tried to see the physical difference in way form after applying SRC.

Spek analysis of the original file and upsampled to 192KHz using Isotope SRC filter. Clearly shows why there is more smoothness in music.
 

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I'm not sure I understand what the graphs indicate ? I presume the X Axis is Frequency and the Y Axis is amplitude in dB ?

What do the different colours .... Blue, Yellow and Green signify ?

Im not so sure that Natural sounds / music is 'Smooth'........ that looks more like Compression... again as I said, I really don't understand the graphs, so some explanations would be really helpful.

Thanks !
 
I'm not sure I understand what the graphs indicate ? I presume the X Axis is Frequency and the Y Axis is amplitude in dB ?

What do the different colours .... Blue, Yellow and Green signify ?

Im not so sure that Natural sounds / music is 'Smooth'........ that looks more like Compression... again as I said, I really don't understand the graphs, so some explanations would be really helpful.

Thanks !

You are right about the compression. The red book audio cd what we listen is generally a downsampled from studio quality (192KHz or higher) to 44.1 KHz. We are trying to reverse engineer this by upsampling.

Reading the graph is pretty simple. The colour scale on the right specifies the amplitude (db). Y-axis specify the frequency.

To fit the audio within redbook specification, one need to compress and cutoff anything over 20KHz. It mostly works as it is above our audible range. But, the decay also gets impacted during SRC. If you look at spek results of mp3, generally you can see a straight line cut at 16K. All because of compression.
 
As I had requested, can you please explain:

What do the different colours .... Blue, Yellow and Green signify ?

Also would be great if you could post those scans so that we we can click on them and enlarge them, and read them meaninfully ?

Thanks

Only trying to understand this fully.

Thanks again.
 
As I had requested, can you please explain:



Also would be great if you could post those scans so that we we can click on them and enlarge them, and read them meaninfully ?

Thanks

Only trying to understand this fully.

Thanks again.

I believe the forum is resizing the images.

Probably, you can try spek yourself. I use it a lot to check the quality of source / recording. You can click on the sample images provided there as well.
 
i just tried out the Audirvana Plus. i liked it. i have used the older version (1.5) and moment i heard this version the difference was very obvious- more weighty sound , better clarity
I had also tried Amarra and had preferred it over the older Audirvana..but the new one kills Amarra.
( used it on integer Mode 1 with default Izotope settings)

using an Imac to my reimyo Dac via the Yellowtec PUC2
 
Looks like Audirvana has taken a lead over pure music, amarra etc..Keep seeing praises on computer audiophile forum.

I had some questions :

If one is doing kernel streaming / wasapi and all that jazz, we are bypassing windows mixer. This means that we are streaming bit perfect via usb to a dac. This can be done using a free player like foobar. If this is our preferred mode of playback, why is there a difference in playback quality among different players ? The Audirvana costs about 70 $.

A background ( to give more context to my thoughts) :
The last time ( 2 years ago ), we compared bit perfect playback between foobar and JRiver, we couldnt tell a difference. But Jplay dual pc playback was a nice jump in quality.
 
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