[rodomo]

I would recommend audirvana plus, since Amarra doen´t work on my mac.

 

[csnr]

I would recommend audirvana plus, since Amarra doen´t work on my mac.

+1

 

[miceblue]

I prefer Audirvana Plus as well. It combines the best of a good user interface, customisable sound options, sound quality, resource management, and overall ease of use. I tried the Amarra trial and I quit using it after a day since it was so unintuitive and I don't use iTunes all that much. Fidelia was good too, but you needed to purchase separate packages to get the full functionality out of it. I like the pseudo VU meters it has on the front panel display though.

I would try JRiver Media Center...but my trial expired when I tried it in its beta phase and upon "extending" my trial period to try it when it got out of the beta phase, nothing happened. >.>

 

[Lohb]

So as a few people have shared their allocated RAM for A+   512M up to 8GB and beyond.... is there any benefit beyond caching/readying of the tracklist after the song currently playing if you are not up-sampling ?

 

[georgelai57]

  So as a few people have shared their allocated RAM for A+   512M up to 8GB and beyond.... is there any benefit beyond caching/readying of the tracklist after the song currently playing if you are not up-sampling ?

I wanted to ask the question on the A+ forums but they still haven't activated my account hence my asking on head-fi. I was allocating some 6GB of my iMac's 8GB and without using the iMac for other duties when listening to DSD. Since then I've been advised that the less I allocate to A+ the better. 

 

[Lohb]

Does anyone know if it is possible to stream Audirvana+ and my FLAC library to an ipad mini over the net to a coffee shop etc with VNC server software ? (I don't subscribe, nor will I, to cloud based services.)
I was looking at the iPad mini but no A+ for it I think (?)
EDIT : I just found this free VNC below, but wonder if it is feasible (Devil in the details and all that...) as I don't have the iPad Mini yet.
 
 
http://www.teamviewer.com/en/download/mac.aspx

 

[thievesarmy]

So, what is the current consensus on the best sounding Mac player? I have Vox and like how slick, simple, and user-friendly it is. Also have Audirvana but don't like it as much, the UI isn't very well done, but it works alright. I just downloaded JRiver Media Center (already don't like the UI but haven't listened to it yet) & Fidelia (which looks very nice), but wondering if there is a majority agreement as far as which produces the best audio.

 

[kazsud]

I bounce between iTunes, Audirvana,+ Fiidelia and Vox.

 

[notox101]

  So as a few people have shared their allocated RAM for A+   512M up to 8GB and beyond.... is there any benefit beyond caching/readying of the tracklist after the song currently playing if you are not up-sampling ?

Increasing allocated RAM is useful when you need to store temporary a large amount of computed data ready to be consume in another computation cycle. In our case, we're dealing with piece of data (tracks), which have to be loaded in RAM, treated to be ready to be sent to audio interface, and finally consumed by it. Preparing a whole track helps to prevent input buffer from interface getting empty. Preparing the next track is even better, so you will move from one track to another without any latency. Preparing the whole tracklist could be interesting if you want to play suddenly a track from your list, or if your player would compute the next track index at the very end of the current one when playing randomly. Also, reserving larger amount of memory let the player deals with several tracks in once, resulting in less multiple hard disk accesses so it (may) reduce interferences.
BUT, this is a very theoretical point of view, because we need to consider that :
1) Dealing with digital playback audio stream nowadays is kind of a piece of cake for processors from desktop & notebook, even with a need of up-sampling. So unless your listening your music on a production server whose procs are fully loaded, most of time, your will be able to do that pretty much on the fly. This argument is of course balanced by the fact that doing very high quality up-sampling is not that simple, and can lead to cpu cycle starvation.
2) Reserving a large amount of memory means your processor has reached its limits for the audio processing you'd like to do. So I guess, if you have an average hardware configuration, that you also don't have that much memory to give to A+. If you don't let enough memory for other processes to run (especially the hungry ones like a good-old safari opened with a tons of javascript running on and some not-as-good-old flash plugins opened), your system will start swapping (yes it's not an exclusive Ms Windows feature), meaning it will get the extra memory from...the hard disk, which will be the worst thing you could expect if your system has been set up to do the swap on one mechanical hard disk.
3) Talking about interferences, if you do have a SSD disk, you probably won't get into that problem. 
 
So actually it makes a little sens to reserve larger amount of memory, but if you're reading your audio files from a SSD, without any up-sampling  on a decent computer you wouldn't need it at all. However, if you're having some trouble while reading your music like latency from playing one track to another, you can try to increase the shared memory of A+, but just don't forget to let some for the others

 

[Zoom25]

  So, what is the current consensus on the best sounding Mac player? I have Vox and like how slick, simple, and user-friendly it is. Also have Audirvana but don't like it as much, the UI isn't very well done, but it works alright. I just downloaded JRiver Media Center (already don't like the UI but haven't listened to it yet) & Fidelia (which looks very nice), but wondering if there is a majority agreement as far as which produces the best audio.

 
The newest Audirvana Plus would definitely have to be there in terms of sound. I use it exclusively because it's the least buggy out of any players I've ever used. I tried Amarra for about a week but gave up eventually due to how annoying the user interface was and the periodic crashing. It wasn't worth it. Audirvana beat Decibel and Bitperfect for me in terms of sound and also how it was easier to use.
 
Now if I can only reroute the audio from VLC to Audirvana while VLC processes the video. Any tips? 

 

[notox101]

I totally agree with putting Audirvana + on the top of list. However, I dislike to be forced to use Itunes to get a correct media player with a library manager (Using Audirvana alone is just a step back to early 2K's).
I used to like Clementine for some reason (I'm more a Linux guy), but Maverick still hates it, and it's just got bearly usable, controls lagging as hell
I also really enjoy JRiver on Windows (never test on MacOS), it's a really good one for audio, well optimized (with thousands of files in library, manipulations are really smooth and fast) and I really like the filter system (you can create your own view with all the filters you want : from the artist, album tag... up to the codec & sampling rate !). It has also some really powerful migration tools to rename/replace your files according to regular expression.
And for some usage Music Player Daemon has to be considered too, providing a different solution based on Client/Server architecture, and which can provide bit perfect too. It's the best thing in a diner/party to remotly control your music !

 

[georgelai57]

Oh no. Audirvana+ is buggy with Mavericks? That puts a damper on my plans for a new MBP. My iMac on Mountain Lion works fine.

 

[Zoom25]

Oh no. Audirvana+ is buggy with Mavericks? That puts a damper on my plans for a new MBP. My iMac on Mountain Lion works fine.

Where are you getting this from?

 

[miceblue]

I'm still not going to upgrade to Mavericks. Too many bugs and problems. >.>

 

[Lohb]

I'm still not going to upgrade to Mavericks. Too many bugs and problems. >.>

A while back Mavericks was prone to crashes, but after this current version it is solid for me anyway. Also, getting zero issues with A+ and Mavericks combo.
24/44 does surprisingly well with my Fostex T50's straight out the 3.5". I think NWAVguy did some run down on Airs and said the 24 bit setting improved things with objective measurements. Anyway, pretty darn good running a pair of planars straight off an Air with A+. Sometimes I just cannot be bothered taking mobile DAC's/amps etc.
 
@notox101 thanks for your run-down on RAM allocation. Honestly, when you don't upscale or use DSD etc 512MB is fine as any track I jump to instantly starts and the rest of it loads in pretty fast with my FLAC-only library.
 
Mr A+ please update your GUI to something slick and modern looking....!