I just learnt the secret to unlocking my dacs performance

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muddda

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Hey Guys,

So I bought a dac about a month or few ago and have been enjoying its performance.

I mainly use spotify and tried tidal, and thought no big difference.

So my set up is:  PC(spotify or tidal)=>DAC(through usb)=>PREAMP =>Power AMP

I watch Pauls videos from ps audio on youtube and he mentions a software product called Audirvana. So i check out their website, and decide to try the software. (Works with windows or mac)

The setup changes to

PC(tidal)=>Audirvana=>DAC(through usb)=>PREAMP =>Power AMP I now can unlock higher sampling rates from the dac and offload some of the processing to the pc.

O my word ... yeah , now thats what about talking about. High Quality audio. The difference was staggering.

My dac does not support MQA natively, but with Audirvana it could.

I suggest if you are using streaming and have a good dac and are an audiophile to give it a try ...

Here is an extract from their site

"Audirvana takes control of the computer?s audio flow, minimizes the signal path, and ensures internal bit-perfect processing. It bypasses the internal audio mixer, avoiding sound events from other applications and unwanted changes to the audio format of your music. In normal use, computer audio playback consists of a sequence of independent tasks. After reception and decoding, the signal passes through an audio ?mixer? that combines sounds from different applications. This mixer modifies the resolution of audio samples under a ?lowest common denominator? rule and uses a low-power algorithm to avoid extra latency, which adds quantification artifacts on top of quality loss.

To avoid interference and damage, Audirvana reserves exclusive access to the audio device and minimizes the number of operations depending on the characteristics of the output converter. The format thus remains unchanged from end to end (bit-perfect). The implementation differs according to the OS: With Mac, it is necessary to impose an integer mode calculation (as opposed to floating) to neutralize the mixer. With Windows, the format remains consistent when the WASAPI driver has exclusive access"


MQA_Audirvana.jpg


and here is a review

https://darko.audio/2018/10/audirvana-plus-for-windows-review/














 
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