Mac AIR v MiND 180 v Auralic ARIES v totaldac d1 server

[PhilP]

Thanks Guillaume and Rufus for all your hard work and the excellent write-up. It was very helpful that you provided so much detail on the various configurations that you tried. It seems that the totaldac was the clear winner and it was very interesting to have your conclusions backed up by the tests that Thierry and others have just done in France.

The price of the totaldac at first seems a bit steep given the fairly limited functionality that a streamer provides but the Naim NDX/XPS2 that I was previously using costs around £7.5k and the NDS/555 is £13k so the price is not outrageous. (The Naim streamers do include internal DACs as well. The analogue output from the NDX is ok but ultimately lacking in detail whilst the NDS does sound very good).

Auralic Aries
I must admit that I was disappointed that the Auralic did not perform so well but as others have suggested maybe it's one of those components that does need to be thoroughly run-in before it sounds good. Perhaps you could try it again in a week or so?

Audirvana
I've been running Audirvana+ with AIR and am not sure what to make of it. As Rufus says in his write-up "AV+ seems to do something a bit odd" and I would tend to agree that it seems to exaggerate the higher frequencies and in my system seems to provide a signal a few db greater that AIR on its own. A+/AIR sounds different to vanilla AIR in my system but not necessarily better. However, the question is complicated by the fact that I can't use all the features of A+ as I'm running OS X 10.6.8 so I can't use Exclusive Access Mode, Direct Mode or Integer Mode. It would be interesting to know what A+ settings you were using with Mavericks.

I do not know how AIR works on its own. Does it use features like Direct Mode and/or Integer Mode ?