Female Vocals are the ultimate test

But, by that I don’t mean recorded female vocals. I mean live vocals, as evidenced by the soft, involuntary sing along by my wife from the kitchen when I switched software from Pure Music to Audirvana in the living room.

In an earlier, pseudo-formal test I devised a test of three software media players – iTunes, iTunes with Pure Music, and iTunes with Audirvana – labelled them A, B and C and asked my wife, who was patiently reading a book curled up on the sofa, to listen to the same track a few times on each and express her preference.

She didn’t like A – she said it was cold and hard in comparison

She oscillated between B and C, before finally saying she could barely tell a difference and deciding she preferred C (which was Pure Music on this occasion).

Personally, I prefer Audirvana. I was very surprised to be able to detect any difference between it and Pure Music, but it does seem to have an edge in terms of dynamic contrast, tension and naturalness. Pure Music seems smoother, but less interesting and a bit more artificial. But it is shades of gray.

What has convinced me to buy a licence for Audirvana, despite its frustrating inability to track an album or playlist correctly (it ends up playing random tracks if you leave it alone, or just loops two or three tracks, which forces me to leap up from my seat every few minutes to select a new one) is the fact that my wife spontanesouly started to sing along to the music when I had Audirvana playing in another room, and remained mute with Pure Music as the source.

There I was playing around with settings, rebooting and trying options, whilst she was completely absorbed in something unrelated in a different room, and Audirvana achieved a high correlation with her singalongs. It’s just more musical and nicer to listen to.

I have to hope the playlist following bug gets ironed out, because it annoys me, but otherwise I am very happy to be using it. What’s more, I’m even happier to again confirm the odd-but-true fact that my digital transport matters, and consistent improvements lead to a more musical, analogue sound every time it gets better. Forget slam, soundstage, bass depth and detail retrieval – it just sounds more and more like music.

Audirvana is therefore thoroughly recommended.