J River Vs. Media Monkey Do they sound different

Yes, actually I made this comparison in the last week and I'm convinced the J. River is audibly superior to Media Monkey. I've deleted Media Monkey and I'm now using J. River Jukebox 14 (the free one).

For me the J. River was a bit more difficult to navigate than the Media Monkey but I can't argue with the sonic performance of the former. It's quite satisfying.

I also use the W4S DAC-2 and J. River was recommended to me by EJ Sarmento of Wyred 4 Sound when I told him I was having some trouble getting the DAC-2 to recognize the sampling frequency with Media Monkey. He said he had the same issue with Media Monkey. To my delight the J. River also sounds better.

Plato:

Thanks to everyone. Plato, setup was pretty simple. i read a lot before I set up J River. The only real issue was making sure Kernel Streaming or Wasapi was selected.

Are there tweaks or hidden issues that you found made a difference in using JRiver? Is there any advantage to using up sampling in the menu?

I have the same setup as above (W4S Dac2 and JRiver 15).
Initially I was using K.Streaming which sounded good. Later J.River released a mode called "wasapi event style", which is what I use now with Win7 64 running on a solid state disc.

KS sounds a bit more polite but Wasapi engine is a bit more analytical and transparent. Make sure to select 24 bit in Jriver's audio setup if you play with Wasapi event style.

I tried Jriver's upsampling with regular 16/44.1k FLAC files but I didn't notice any great improvements. I leave the native resolution of whatever file I play.

Cheers

Digilog5 - why do you suggest using 24 bit in JRiver for Event Style? Do you hear a difference on 16/44 material by expanding to 24?

Based on the reading I have done, with Wasapi-event-style you need to have the wordlength pre-set to 24 bit, which is what the dac expects.

Initially I did not know about this and the Jriver would play for a few seconds and then cause my pc to crash and then needed to reboot DAC and Windows. Setting the wordlength to 24 bits is just a requirement of the certain pc-dac communication (wasapi) and works perfectly. It is described in the JR Media Center setup guide for Win Vista/7 from the computer audiophile forum or the guidelines posted by Ayre or DCS. This is not required however for Kernel Streaming which allows you to set anything you want.

I've not heard M.Monkey though. I'd like to listen to Pure Music or AyreWave too in Mac OS and compare.

Thanks,