In short, think about what the software offers. The trebles simply shimmered, the transparency was astounding, bass was solid, tight but not overpowering. Then, from the very first note of the trial piece I was using, Audirvana showed its superiority to all others. HQ Player has an interface that still in the Windows 95 era, JRiver, while it’s mac interface has improved since I last tried it, sounded just so bad - muddy, excessive bass, trebles lost. I gave up on Roon when I had to map our network drives myself (Audrivana just does it, by pointing to network drives when setting up a library), Amarra does not do ethernet uPnP (needed for microRendu, and I didn’t want to go back to plugging my macMini directly into my DAC). I’ve tried most of the well known alternatives these past few days to see if there were real alternatives. But I’ve not really seen many comments about what we get with Audirvana.

I have to say that I have some sympathy for the arguments against software subscriptions (How many do we find ourselves having?) There must be some limit to how many/how much we can accept.

Jriver27