L Zhao
New Head-Fier
- Joined
- Jul 11, 2013
- Posts
- 13
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- 11
Interesting, didn't know Sony had a high resolution app for Mac desktop.
All players do work on my 2013 Macbook Pro (El Capitan 10.11.16). I use Spotify, Tidal, iTunes, HQPlayer (trial) but primarily Amarra 4.
After all cables and connections are made:
Step 1. Go to Macbook "sound" setting and click "output" to select DAC
Step 2. Go to "Audio Midi Setup" and select your audio device (probably will already be highlight but check anyway).
Step 3. When the sound app player is open, I have to make sure the settings are correctly highlighted, pointing the app to the audio device (DAC in this case) and buffer size.
I don't have my Sony with me right now at work, but the above should work. There should be no problem running the TA-ZH1ES on a Macbook and I assume it is fine for newer Macs. I don't know if Step 2 is always required but sometimes with my other DACs I wasn't getting the correct output depth and bitrate so I would go into Audio Midi to fix that. It's a one time fix, you won't have to continually go back. What I did find is that if I had multiple sound devices installed with their own software, the previous audio device attached could be highlighted and not the current one.
I do like Amarra but open to hearing about other players people use.
I did some research and found there are lots of Audio DAC issue related to latest Mac OS Sierra - Apparently one of the core audio library is broken in latest mac.
Ref: https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/65232
I followed one of the advise from audirvana forum by replacing the IOAudioFamily.kext with the one from El Capitan, now Mac OS and Tidal can output audio to TA-ZH1ES via Core Audio layer using the preset sampling rate (e.g. 44khz/16bits) from MIDI setting.
However, when enable "Exclusive Mode" / "Direct Mode" it still freeze and quit. This certainly has an impact to audio quality (e.g. Amp shows 192khz/32bits when playing Tidia with Exclusive mode off, the core audio does the upsampling using midi setting....) .... and without Direct Mode, I will have to switch the sampling rate manually when play different music file, which is a nightware.
Still trying to see if there is a way to resolve this.