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

[PhilP]

PhilP - I almost get the impression Audivarna is a bit like an over-saturated picture on TV, it's just slightly too much. Interesting though I didn't really get this impression on Guillaume's system yesterday where I found it a little more subtle. I have just remember for some reason I've had the 3 settings in General Settings ticked (Exclusive access mode, use max I/O buffer size, integer mode) and I don't think Guillaume does. We both had roblems with these initially then for some reason with me it just decided to start working with them ticked - no idea why. I guess it's probably integer mode that would affect sound quality more than the others?

Rufus,

You would certainly have expected A+ to sound better with those parameters selected so it does seem strange that Guillaumes system sounded better when they weren't

It's certainly not clear to me what differences the various settings in A+ make when running in conjunction with AIR. In fact I'm suspicious that they may not all be working when using AIR even when they're selected.

When changing parameters in A+ I found that I actually had to restart both it and AIR in order for the changes to take effect - in fact I found I easier just to restart my iMac to make sure this happened.

Rufus and PhilP,

Here are some images of my settings, as you can see some parameters have been selected:



Guillaume

Thanks. Those are the same parameters that I could set with OSX 10.6.8/AIR so your set-up clearly isn't using the full capability of A+ either

I'm not sure who, if anyone, really understands the technical details of how A+ interacts with AIR. I guess s the AIR developers would be able to tell us but it's possible that even they may not have investigated this in detail.

I remember in a post somewhere on this forum that Thierry from Devialet support had told someone that because of the way that AIR works other players like A+ And Amarra could not improve the sound. Perhaps he's right ?