Amarra for iTunes at RMAF...

Oh, and Mark, you should be sure to visit the forums at Computer Audiophile, if you haven't already.

As a Windows software engineer for some 15 years now (independent consultant) I agree with Antipodes_audio. Windows has it's place, but OSX is a unix platform...read 40+ years of ongoing development. Unix in any flavor is inherently more stable and manages memory FAR FAR BETTER (and I would know) than Windows. I like Windows (heck, I make a living with it) but would I ever let it serve up my music ? AH! noway. It simply does not (fact not opinion) manage memory or the processor as well as OSX and every developer knows this. I write for both platforms .NET for Win and Objective C for iPhone apps/OSX. Bits are not just bits when you are dealing with irq's, threading stacks time-slices and the such. Again, I make a living with Windows dev, but I will tell you right now, if it came to a mission critical system...Ah Chuck I'll take the Unix based system for $200.00. I am always amazed when folks attempt to make Windows look as stable or handle memory or the processor (multi-cores) as well as OSX.

Not trying to start anything just saying that as an informed developer on how the internals of both work..., well I think you get it.

Opps, my comment was intended for the response dated 10/19/2009 of Antipodes_audio. i failed to take note that this thread was multiple pages. My bad.

Still very relevant though Audiofun. The interesting thing I found, apart from the Mac sounding better, was how they also sounded different. The best sound I could get out of a PC sounded a little hazy and soft, which I relate to the sound of a coaxial SPDIF cable. The sound of a Mac without Amarra sounded like you had swapped out the Coax cable and inserted an AT&T cable - cleaner, faster, better dynamics and PRAT, but with the downside of a touch of glare. Amarra more or less removes that glare, depending on how you get the bits out of the Mac.

Thanks Dan, I will keep an eye out for that new Weiss INT202. As you say, the Vesta is hard to justify. Paying similar money you can get Weiss to throw in a DAC, it would seem.

I tried a Lynx card briefly (it was only on loan) and slightly preferred the Empirical Off-ramp 3 with Superclock, so bought the Off-ramp. But I may have been hasty there so may buy myself a Lynx card and give it some more time. Particularly as I run 3 way active speakers and may want to do the crossovers in software and use six of those output channels on the AES16.

All: I've been playing around with the Sample Manager demo version this weekend and think I like the files I've upsampled. I first converted to 24 bit, then upsampled that file to 96k (I'm limited to 96k as I use the MW Transporter; Transporters won't play 192k files). My question is whether anyone has experimented with the various dither options and if so what their reactions are?

Thanks in advance,

Randy