Any Audirvana Plus enthusiasts out there?
Last September I bought an Audioquest Dragonfly. In my quest to feed it the best sampling rates to get the best sound, I also downloaded and bought Audirvana Plus. After messing around with the system for awhile I concluded I was getting more benefit from Audirvana than the Dragonfly, so I took the Dragonfly back. So lately I'm reading the reviews of the new Meridian Explorer and I'm thinking that maybe it'll give me the extra level of musical satisfaction that I didn't quite get from the Dragonfly.
But wait! the next time I open Audirvana I find that I haven't updated for awhile. I do an update and jump from 1.4.6 to 1.5.2, and now I'm at 1.5.4. Is it just me or did something special happen with 1.5.x, because I'm enjoying computer audio as I never have before. Just since upgrading to 1.5.4 I've already downloaded 5 new 24/96 or 24/88.2 files from HDTracks. Where before computer-based audio mostly served as background music, and I reserved involved listening to the turntable, now when I'm cleaning up the kitchen with Audirvana playing 24-bit files, the musical truth draws me out of the kitchen to sit or stand in the sweet spot and take it all in, just like when I first got a turntable to break free from mass market CD players and redbook CDs.
I'm not saying that LPs and 24/96 digital are identical, and I still like good analog a bit better, but the 24-bit files through Audirvana 1.5.x files really draw me into the music. There may be an asynchronous 24/192Khz USB DAC in my future, but for now the improvements to Audirvana are making me pretty happy with computer audio.
Anybody else have any opinions on this?