Allen asked for a continuation of a brief post I put up on the VFC thread. I attended a demo over the past weekend of, among other things, computer based music: how to get audiophile quality sound from the music on your computer. The salesperson, who has become a good friend of ours, then came to our house Thursday morning to demo a variant of the system.
Sounded great. So he left the DAC for a week for us to see what we could do.
He used a fairly new MacBook, usb cable connection to the DAC, which was the Ayre Acoustics QB-9 that Stereophile loves. He used the software LXD to copy the CD onto the hard disk, and another program, Amarra, to play it in some sort of conjunction with iTunes.
I've been playing with it since he left with two CDs. One is Willie Nelson's Naked Willie which is a remastered version of some of Willie's late 60s and early 70s hits with the string section subtracted. Great disc. Then I have a full set, recently bought, of Telemann's Table Music.
The sound I get is quite good but not as good as our friend got Thursday morning. That was better than CD quality because, he claimed, it took advantage of the full 16 bits, whereas a regular CD player does not. The sound I'm getting is equivalent to the CD sound but slightly thinner. Far better than we've ever gotten with iPods on the system.
So I'm not yet doing it quite right.
If anyone knows anything about this kind of a system, I would love to hear your thoughts. |
