AIR 3 Beta for Mac

[DelaneyB]

Some thoughts on implementing Devialet AIR:

My relationship with AIR has been tumultuous; since I got my D900 end of January, I have been trying to implement without success; I benefited from the help of a fervent supporter of AIR in the person of Jalucine on the French forum but until this week nothing worked. I could not.

My specifications was: get to organize the playing tracks from an iPad and integrate digitized files on my Mac Mini and those streamed from Qobuz. So I was reluctant to use iTunes and also JRiver which are unfamiliar with Qobuz.

I clung to Audirvana as the only possible way to solve my problem. At the same time, before the v3.0 beta, Audirvana and AIR did not manage to play from one song to another with a different sampling rate. It was so complicated and it needed to use the upsampling in Audirvana to be working.

Fast forward to my recent fight with technical support from Devialet which advised me earlier this week to return to USB and Audirvana; I was on the verge of returning my machine

I observed that the configuration that allowed to operate my Amethyst, namely JRiver on MacMini with BubbleUPnP to integrate Qobuz, also worked with AIR, provided:
- AIR on Mac is started
- JRiver is set to work with AIR (see copying config screen); you will notice that the mode 'Integer' is supported


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- MacMini is selected as Media Renderer instead of Amethyst in the BubbleUPnP Server config

Once you do that, and publish JRvier library as a Media Server, you have access to your library on the Mac and Qobuz or Tidal from the Lumin app on iPad . It's cool

Remains to understand what are the limitations of AIR.
AIR v3.0 in Beta suffers from two major flaws:
- It causes very unpleasant cracklings when the network adapter can not send frames fast enough to the Devialet
- It causes whites of several seconds (drop-outs) when the driver is overwhelmed.

It is therefore essential to prohibit, whatever the reason and except if you have a pretty powerful machine, like a MacBook Pro with Quad processor, the dynamic changing of the sampling rate of the audio files (up-sampling or down -sampling); In the same spirit, I think Room Correction plugins  are currently unwelcome. In any case, for small machines as my MacMini with dual-core i5, even at 2.8 GHz, it is absolutely prohibited.

Then it is useful if you have a dedicated machine for audio, unless it is very powerful, to use Mac OSX optimization scripts from Computer Audio Design: http://www.computeraudiodesign.com/ osx-a ... imization /.

Then, you should minimize the network traffic, and work with audio files on the Mac disk or connected to the Mac via USB or Thunderbolt and refrain from using a NAS.

You should know that AIR WiFi is deemed to sound better that AIR Ethernet, but is much less robust and requires above all a more powerful machine to stream from. This is even more true if you are trying to stream high-res audio files. I cannot, for instance, reliably stream high-res (24/192 or DSD 64) from the AIR MacMini through WiFi. This bugs very quickly. But, as I write this contribution, I am listening to a stream in 24/192 from my MacBook Pro and it works pretty well. For the moment

Everything is common sense. And I missed common sense, but the Devialet support did nothing to put me on the track ... and that is my biggest complaint. While the Trinnov support is operational and knows its machines very well, the Devialet support is friendly but does not invest in supporting clients. So I was left there alone fighting to advance against the technical support if I may say so.

Here, Devialet AIR has been working for me for a few  hours ...

To summarize:
- Prioritize Ethernet over WiFi when possible and if you stream high-resolution files
- Avoid downloading simultaneously to using AIR; or do expect cracklings
- Do not change the sampling rate dynamically within the software player
- JRiver works well with AIR Devialet in Integer mode, Audirvana does not yet
- JRiver and Audirvana offer integration with Qobuz / Tidal
- at home, Audirvana causes drop-outs with MacMini, this is not the case with JRiver
- both work well on the MacBook Pro Quad proc.
- I think it is better to choose a streaming machine with i7 processors; my interpretation of perpetual lags (drop-outs) to my Mac Mini with Audirvana and Devialet AIR is that Audirvana is not working in integer mode and therefore requires converting floats to integer, task that the i5 processor is not equipped to process effectively. But this is only an assumption on my part ...

And when it works, it's magic. The sound of the Devialet is optimal.

I'm using Air 3 on a 2012 Mac Mini (SSD with 16GB RAM) with Audirvana 2.
Integer mode works but direct mode does not.
I do not upsample.