Auralic Aries

[Kunter]

3. Have you noticed any difference between vanilla AIR on the Macbook versus AIR with A+? I'm still not sure how A+ can improve the sound when AIR + itunes is bit perfect?

In my experience, A+ makes a difference. More air, more involvement.

The effect is more so when the volume is high enough so that the volume of A+, strangely enough active, reads 0 db.

Cheers...

Ok, interesting. How do you find the useability of A+? I really want to be able to control all my music from an iPad. That includes both CD-quality and Hi-Res (don't care if its FLAC or AIFF or whether its on a NAS or USB HDD), Qobuz and internet radio. My current understanding is that I can currently only do this from a streamer like the Aries or NAD M50. Or is it possible to do this seamlessly from A+ or JRiver?

Thanks,

Philip

Sound is great but usability sucks for A+. Yes it can be integrated with iTunes, even put proxy files for FLAC on iTunes, and play them using remote on iPad but this loses some of the magic to my ears so to get the best sound, its best to use A+ on standalone mode... And I repeat this so many times but its worth it in my opinion: for the best best performance, my choice is to place files on a ram disk as WAV files and play from there... Its a lot of work but still less than the hassle of vinyl playback

JRiver for Mac, I tried a while back, but it was not stable and I was not happy with the sound.

My settings for playback are:

Mac Book Pro, 16 g ram, 4 g reserved as ram disk
Mac Preferences, sound settings, output device : internal speakers (this is to route everything else than A+ away from Devialet...
A+: Preferences, Audio System, only "use max buffer" selected, sys optimiser: all items checked, A+ priority: very high, NO upsampling or filters etc on A+
Devialet Air settings: 1000 ms buffer, default format 16 bits 44100 Hz (to avoid chipmunks...)

cheers

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Rufus/Kunter:

Can you share what type of Audirvana setup gives you the best results with the Devialet? [in one blog there was a recommendation to try direct mode/integer 1, upsampling x2, filter max 1,800,000 , cutoff1.05 , antialiasing 200, pre ringing 0.6]. Thanks V

I could not make the integer mode work with devialet AIR. even the "exclusive access mode" comes with its own problems so I leave it off... All other settings are defaults... no filters no upsampling etc.