Newbie to Head-Fi, hello to all!
Like others I held off Amarra for a while, but with Lion decided to give the player a run...there were problems, no gapless in iTunes, skipping, oh dear, but the sound quality was bar none, Pure Music is a close second, but others have said, Amarra engages, there's no mistaking.
With Mountain Lion though on a fresh install with only music apps on 2010 MBP SSD 6GB RAM, Amarra 2.4.1 worked like a treat. Gapless was true to form, and yes 50% of RAM should be allocated to memory play.
Sometimes though, the sample rate switching goofs up, but this has some interaction with Audirvana + perhaps not closing properly, Audio Midi takes a while for the DAC to settle to a different rate if set manually is a sympton of the fs goofing up. If Audirvana doesn't play from a fresh boot, Amarra is fine for hours on end.
Now running Symphony with the meters, as to the SQ between $189 Amarra difficult to quantify, but worth the effort for two licenses which I need.
My wish is for Sonic Studio to get behind DSD using DoP or on the fly conversion for PCM only DACs. One day. Playing DSD would overcome a lot of messy sample rate switching and different PCM formats we have now.
