

If you have a Qobuz subscription, find an album called WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT, by PAUL METHENY.ġst track: The Sound of silence, listen the first 35 seconds. It is up to you if you want to call this bit perfect. Where I am going with this, is that Audirvana does not stream the exact bit stream from your FLAC or DSF files to the DAC, it does some sort of cleanup/correction, even with everything off. The sound difference between these versions is much less apparent with Rock or Pop music. AS has a little but darker, pushed back tone. I did a lot of research that shows that for Jazz, Classical and Orchestral recording v3.5 has a more precise sound, that is more open and clear. If someone is trying to sell you a product that has a “better bit-perfect”, they're tricking you (and maybe themselves).With all processing, upsampling etc off Audirvana 2.x, 3.x have a very pleasant tone. Regardless, JRiver Media Center uses less than 1% of a modern CPU for normal playback. And if there is a problem, it's obvious (ticks, hiccups, hum, etc.) and not something subtle with regards to clarity, soundstage, etc. It doesn't make sense and can't be detected or measured when using good audio hardware. In other words, there's no room for improvement here.

Number 2 doesn't affect sound quality unless there's a shortfall, but regardless, JRiver Media Center has the most efficient buffer fill that can be implemented on a computer (a no-lock circle buffer with no additional processing). Lots of players do number 1, and it's easy to measure. The only relevant things happening for audio playback are:ģ) Keeping system usage low enough to avoid trouble They don't have the same pretty lights as your expensive hardware, but they can decode and process audio in a way that will deliver the highest possible quality.īit-perfect players, playing the same content, running in bit-perfect mode sound the same. If you're C, you might consider moving towards B. A computer is an amazing tool for audio processing with nearly unlimited performance, flexibility, and audio quality.
Bitperfect vs audirvana iso#
If you're B, JRiver has an unparalleled audio processing engine – simple things like 64-bit volume, all the way to complicated things like unlimited parametric processing, Room Correction, Convolution, ISO 226:2003 corrected volume, etc. Pick the player that checks the other boxes listed above (performance, user interface, etc.). If you're A, all you want is bit-perfect output. Roughly speaking, people think about digital audio in one of three ways:Ī) The source is perfect, and all processing is bad processingī) Good sound is the goal, and sometimes processing can helpĬ) Processing can be good, but I want to do it in my external hardware All of these things work together to help you enjoy your media. Also consider performance, stability, format support, user interface, remote support, device support, etc. However, many good players can do bit-perfect output, JRiver Media Center included.Ī good starting point when picking an audio player is to make sure it's capable of bit-perfect output.īit-perfect output is just one of many, many features of a media player.

Or it might be because they don't support the output method necessary for certain hardware to work well (Winamp, etc.). This might be because they output through the system mixer which resamples to a common "mixing sample rate" (iTunes, WMP, etc.). Some players don't do bit-perfect output. When used to describe a media player, it means the player can output an exact copy of a file without making any changes. Bit-perfect is a phrase commonly used in the audio world.
