Ok, it appears that for some reason unbeknown-st to the makers of the Hiface (their words)some macs still have the clicking and popping problem. They are working on a new driver.
New things, I have finally given up on Amarra, it simply destroys very fine detail that iTunes easily renders. I have lived with it for about 6 months now and I have decided to move on. I did love the fact that it could switch my midi sampling rate on the fly and bypass iTunes SRC mechanism...but the sound trumps those features... BUT!!!!
I found Pure Vinyl and it seems nearly perfect. It bypasses iTunes and switches the midi settings, is only $229.00 has a 64 bit core, allows one to record and has built in 64 bit RIAA processing for archiving vinyl. Finally, it sounds better than Amarra to these ears. The low level information I mentioned earlier (and at the very start of this thread when speaking of my Amarra trials) is present once again.
It can also be used as a memory player, which I think sounds best and sort of negates the need for expensive SSD drives. It will buffer your music (in my case, from my 1TB NAS over wifi) to the internal memory of my mac mini and then play it from there. Sometimes there is a slight delay, but in Hybrid mode, it launches another thread and starts to preload the next track so it is nearly seamless.
The ONKY thing I have found that Amarra does better is related to 'remote' on my iPhone/touch. The realtime file playback timing information is veryv ery smooth when using iTunes alone or when using iTunes with Amarra. Not so with Pure Vinyl, first you have to turn it on in the preferences and then it is jumpy and can make the music skip a bit. They need to address this, but it is a minor annoyance and I leave it off for now.
So there you have it, between the Hiface and Pure Vinyl (about $410.00 (Pure Vinyl is slated to go up to $299.00 with the next full release) I can play ALL my files all the way up to 24/192khz... The Hiface will pass 32 bit information should you have any.
Oh, one last thing I love about the Pure Vinyl, it reads your midi setting upon start up and uses that number to base up sampling on (should you turn upsampling on, I prefer it off but it is very good, just not as good as no upsampling to me) for instance: say most of your' files are 44.1 I think it would be smart to pick 88.2khz as the midi setting. Now with upsampling on, PV will upsample everything below 88.2 (which will probably be mostly 44.1 stuff) to 88.2 (even order math) anything 88.2 or greater will be player as NATIVE S.R. with no upsampling involved. So if you are a fan of upsampling this is the golden ticket...or egg ... or goose or whatever it is thats golden and good :)
