Tidal Speakers owners

Tbg,

having extensive experience with computer based audio, I strongly suggest you should prefer Amarra instead of the Pure Music. I believe that Pure Music tonality is wrong. My Weiss Medea/Vesta setup is quite neutral and similar to yours so I believe you will easily hear the difference when you are listening to piano (Pure music sound is thinner than it should be)... I also saw some serious improvement when I used a firewire cable made by the professional division of Oyaide. Check AsiaWeiss for more info...

Geopolitis, I will try Amarra again, but it was no contest when last I compared the two when it was Pure Music 1.40 not the new 1.63.

Geopolitis, I installed Amarra 2 and listened to two cds. I don't know whether it plays from the hard drive or from memory or ram. It is louder than Pure Music and has more pronounced bass. It doesn't have the top end of Pure Music and thus lacks the ambience retrieval and sense of sound stage.

I will listen more this evening and then do some fast as I can comparisons, but right now I prefer Pure Music as it has greater realism of the recording event.

In my opinion that trick of lowering the midbass region by few db in order to give the impression that there is more resolution and more details in the rest of the audible spectrum is totally unacceptable. I have seen the same trick used on and on by cable or DAC manufacturers and it pisses me off.
In order to understand where is the real difference between the Amarra and Pure Music try a comparison between your DAC and a Benchmark. You will hear exactly the same effect. Same with cables (I have personally compared my Argento Flow with a Stealth Indra RCA interconnect and heard exactly the same).

Except the midbass gap, there is also a phase shift in some upper frequencies that gives you the effect of the deeper soundstage. But then, was this depth really what the mastering engineer had in his mind or is it created by the software using those phase shift tricks?

Geopolitis, sorry that is not my experience. I do hear the difference with my SR and Exemplar cables and with my H-Cat, Weiss Minerva, and Weiss Dac202, but that only proves the superiority of Pure Music. I will soon have my Exemplar/Oppo 83 back and will see which it is closer to the PM or Amarra.