Highest Possible Sound Quality from iTunes

[Pim]

As an update.  Could it now be that the answer to the 'Highest Possible Sound Quality from iTunes' question is now, quite simply, a Mac + AIR 3?

I was just about to post that this whole thread is now obsolete but you beat me to it. Good times!

I take your point Pim, but I wouldn't say a thread like this could ever be considered closed, there is always something new, or an additional tweak to try!

Anyway, I don't have a Mac of any description, so I can't even try this.     For those who have tried iTunes / Mac / AIR 3), what do you think?

I've had a whole weekend of iTunes>Amarra>AIR3 and loved it. 

But I have to stress it's been ages since I've had the house to myself and have been able to keep my system playing music 24/3 (24/7 for only 3 days) On top of that, I didn't do A/B testing either. I'm still of the opinion that moving my head 3 or 4 inches out of the sweet spot still has a bigger impact than cables/player/input and I still haven't found a solid way to keep my seat properly in the sweet spot.

Having said that; as above. I had a lot of fun. So that could be a good indicator that AIR sounds better than USB. And that with 2 x 20m of cheap Cat5E cable.

[Seb310]

Hello.
Concerning the sound quality with itunes : considering Itunes as just a "file manager", Audirvana (or whatever) as "transmitter" in bit perfect mode, and considering an asynchronous transmission to the Dev (managing the DAC), where (or when) could occurs any loss in the data ? And by the way, what can explain a difference between two asynchronous methods (ie AIR3 and USB) ?

Thanks for your lignting

[Confused]

I have reported elsewhere about my early experiences of the microRendu, where my sound quality observations were made using Roon to provide the music. Anyway, a little reported feature of the mR is that it has a 'sharepoint' emulator. So in theory it should be able to run a mR via iTunes. I gave this a try today, and I can confirm that yes, you can run iTunes on a PC and play lovely music via a microRendu on the same network, it works fine. So how does it sound? Unfortunately, not very good! OK, it's not too bad, perfectly listenable, but it is a clear step down from running iTunes on a Windows PC, WASAPI, Devialet AIR 2.1.3, which in itself is a step down from JRiver, WASAPI, AIR, or the same with Roon. So it works, but highest possible sound quality from iTunes, not even close in this set up.