Neil Young Archives

[Zappydev]

I can't speak for the Phantom or the optical output, but I just dropped a 24/192 file from my NAS into iTunes, and played it out to the Dev via AIR. Dev said it was playing at 44.1 but then when I went into the Audio/MIDI control panel I switched it to 24/192 and after a short pause the track resumed playing, and this time the Dev confirmed 192.

So, I am confident that the streamed tracks will play at maximum resolution, but thanks for the reminder to check what is happening inside the Mac.

My confidence was misplaced. Internally I can stream 24/192 all day over AIR, and I have a steady 60+ Mbps broadband connection, but I was not successful in getting a stream from the archives to play nicely. Even the low-res feeds were choppy, and the 'master' feeds either wouldn't play at all or were totally broken up. I tried with a 2 different Macs and a Win10 machine, all using the most recent AIR driver, but nothing helped. I would try USB but I can't be bothered to faff around enabling an input on the Dev, so I'll leave that to someone else. On the local machines, the sound was fine. Maybe I am missing something in the set-ups, but there isn't much to tinker with as far as I can see.

I am pretty disappointed, because I rather like the skeuomorphic user interface, and there is a heck of a lot of music in there.