AIR 3 Beta for Mac

[Fla7a]

I've just done a very quick test of AIR 3 beta vs Melco N1A with just a couple of tracks, not super audiophile tracks at all but just stuff I listen to. Nick Drake's 'One Of These Things First  (HDTracks 24/96 version) and Sufjan Stevens 'The Only Thing' (CD rip).  Both FLAC files.
I'm using AIR 3 on a 2011 MacBook Air with Audivarna 2.5 - default settings except integer & direct mode turned off. Files being played are on local disk.
Melco connected via USB to the Devialet, and using Minimserver.

From this very brief test I find AIR 3 more transparent. It's slightly easier to follow individual instruments. Bass is wonderfully well-defined. It does sound very jitter-free.
Melco is very very slightly 'blurrier'. It's perhaps more 'analogue'.  I can imagine a lot of people would prefer this.

They are very close! There really isn't a lot in it and I think I would struggle to differentiate in a blind test.  My inclination is towards AIR 3 in this instance.   The problem is I don't like the usability of the AIR 3 options as I have them (Audivarna or iTunes on a MacBook) and prefer playing tracks from my iPad so in general usage I think I'd go back to the Melco.

The interesting thing is that I never really liked AIR 2. It always tended to be towards the bottom of my playback choices even when it wasn't spitting out white noise or dropouts, so this is a real result for me for AIR 3.  Now if only they could port the AIR 3 sender to run on Melco ...

Hi Rufus,

thanks for your effort to compare it at such short notice and your impressions.
The result is quite unexpected, since the Melco sounded definitely better than AIR2, but I trust your judging on this.
So it's quite impressive what they did with AIR3 SQ wise, which makes me wonder, how the new streaming module will sound like.
Yes, Melco as standalone source would really be something, especially if they could somehow port Roon to the Melco...