PURE MUSIC VS AUDIRVANA FULL
PURE MUSIC VS AUDIRVANA SOFTWARE
PURE MUSIC VS AUDIRVANA PLUS

PURE MUSIC VS AUDIRVANA FULL

Using 24 bits allows the full dyadic rage of the music to be reproduced if your sound system is capable of reproducing it. Something has to give, and it’s usually at both ends of the dynamic range. Further, it’s impossible to reproduce the cannon blasts at the end of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture without losing the softest passages in the quantization noise of the smallest bits. The human ear is dynamic and so our effective dynamic range is much greater. Even then, although the dynamic range of the CD is greater than 90db, it’s static. Granted, CD quality can be quite good IFF the mastering is done well, which is seldom the case, particularly with popular music. Qobuz vs Tidal: This really isn’t a fair contest, given that the Qobuz tracks were all Hi-Res and the Tidal tracks were CD lossless.

PURE MUSIC VS AUDIRVANA SOFTWARE

I suspect the software MQA decoding algorithm in Audirvana is no match for the hardware decoding of the Dragonfly, but Audirvana’s handling of CD-quality lossless music is unmatched. On the other hand, The Dragonfly has hardware MQA decoding, which probably makes all the difference.

PURE MUSIC VS AUDIRVANA PLUS

The Tidal iOS app is no match for Audirvana Plus and my iMac, and as good as the Audioengine speakers are, they’re no match for the Beyerdynamic TP1s. One major difference then versus now, however, was that when I listened before at work, my DAC was an Audioquest Dragonfly Black 1.5 driven by an iPhone 6s+, connected to a pair of Audioengine A2+ speakers. However, that was not my previous experience with Tidal when I listened a couple of years ago. The MQA versions sounded flat, lacking in depth, bandwidth and soundstage. MQA vs Lossless: The first big surprise was that the lossless tracks sounded considerably better than the same tracks in MQA. The differences in sound quality were striking and in a way, surprising. I didn’t do random blinded testing, as the results were not subtle. All of the Tidal tracks were 16 bit / 44.1kHz, with a few of them also in MQA. I also have Weather Report in DSD64 for comparison.

The Qobuz and local tracks were identical in resolution - 24 bit / 44.1kHz, 96kHz and 192kHz. The only requirement was that all tracks be available on Tidal and Qobuz as well as in my library. I selected several tracks for my test spanning a wide variety of music types - including tracks by Bach and Tchaikovsky, Miles Davis, Weather Report and Wayne Shorter, Frank Sinatra and Willie Nelson, The Beatles, The Carpenters, David Bowie, Hozier, Weezer and Daft Punk. Because my wife has sensitive hearing, however, most of my critical listening is done with headphones. I also have an older Mac mini as a media server for my home theater, and I’ll try to test that setup another time. The DAC is a Beyerdynamic Impacto driving TP1 headphones. My setup is a late-model iMac running Mojave with a 3.6GHz quad core Intel Core I7 CPU, 32 GB RAM, a 500 GB SSD and my media is on an 8 TB LaCie Thunderbolt HDD. I conducted an experiment today to compare the sonic quality of tracks played using A+ from different sources.

Pure music vs audirvana