Pure Vinyl/Amarra

Yes, Pure Music and Amarra seem to be the main competitors for audiophile music playback programs. There have been numerous readilysearchable threads on these products, and I bet the names are familiar to a majority of audiogoners who are working on computer audio.

Just goes to show, one person's obvious is another's obscure.

FWIW, PM seems to generate detectable sonic improvement over iTunes (that's the music program that comes with MAC computers!) in my system, and (IMO) represents a bargain at 80 bucks. But I have found the version I use (I think 1.03) to be twitchy, and prone to freezing and the like. Anyone have better luck with more recent versions?

John

That either is truly better is open for discussion. The ability to automatically adjust sample rate is the big value, but the sound is more subject to what sample rate you are using ,what DAC you are using and your computer configuration. I have been trying to determine if either is better than iTunes but instead have determined that Pure Music is different, not bad mind you but different. And Amarra, well this has me stuck. I would say it can be better but more often it can be worse. But my impressions is from the demo version. Someone will chime in and say you need to pay $1000 to find out but a demo version should let you hear a positive difference. Not a negative difference. In my case, images were bloated and unnatural in size for 16/44.1 recordings. And on high resolution it was very similar to iTunes, maybe better. I would definitely let your ears decide. And if my PC Audio setup sounded thin and digital then I would investigate Amarra.

Pure Music functionality is pretty nice. For the money it is worth it if it functioned perfectly. It is getting there. Only stuck on high resolution / Memory playback. The visual interface is very nice as well.

I'm with Elizabeth, I had no idea what they were talking about...

Did I not list this under PC Audio?

Amarra and PV is some pretty basic stuff in this realm of the Cosmos.

I tried Pure Music a few ago and found it very bug ridden. It didn't seem like a finished product. It was hard to determine whether it was a real improvement over iTunes at Redbook resolution or not. Does Amarra still require a dongle?