Quote:
Originally Posted by
melomaniac 
well, yes... on the other hand, come on now - many people here have spent that amount and more on a pair of cans, on cables (forsooth!), or even on stands. so why not if we are chasing the elusive last 5% of audio goodness? I personally have been focusing on getting the computer further away from the transducers, because even my mini server isn't completely silent, and I won't even mention the noises emitted by my laptop right now as I type this. anyway, for me the mac audio software isn't the most tractable bottleneck, there's cabling and software formats and tubes and other tweaks that will have more of an impact than whether or not I turn to PureMusic or Cog to play a Flac file here (I probably could not tell the difference without looking, but I haven't tried). if people are at the point where picking a dedicated apple-mac program is chosen, try anything that floats your boat.
I think the key here is still "try it it's free" and anyone can decide if it's right for them.
But I actually do have some logic here, flawed though it probably is: since iTunes will output bit perfect, unless you want a complete new UI and don't like iTunes, the real value to a paid player is upsampling and sample rate switching to avoid Audio Midi and lot's of iTunes relaunches.
Upsampling can't "create" true missing data, though in some instance if the interpolotion is really good, it can synthesize it, but the real benefit is to get potential aliasing artifacts out of audio band. And for this I really like the upsampling and it's easily worth the $130 for Pure Music, to me, others don't notice or aren't bothered by it and don't care. I couldn't get Fidelia to run, but I really liked the way it looked, and they were super-response for customer support, but I had no time to spend on this so I will try in a few months when they have it stable.
The Amarra uses the same scaling engine as Fidelia, and is 1/5 the price, more or less, and provides a nice UI, so I just can't see needing Amarra unless you have some very specialized needs, and of course someone will. Pure Music is totally utilitarian but sure sounds nice to me, and makes their own upsampler.
As you note, there are other areas to invest in and one I find valuable was adding HiFace, as a lot of 24/96 USB devices don't support 88.2 because they use the tenor chip, so 88.2K files downsample to RedBook, which just conceptually bugged me so much I had to find a solution. 
The HiFace card worked for me after I upgraded the driver, as I could use coax, and both my USB devices that couldn't take 88.2 over usb could take it over coax. That was definitely "extra 5% goodness" and totally made the most of Pure Music. I think the coax sounds better, but I may just be imagining it too. Haven't bothered to test A/B as I'm happy...
