N-DAC and Apple Midi sound configuration

Salvo,

Its good to see you are still alive and well.

Richard might move this over to the Sreaming Audio room for you.

As you will get more feed back from there.

Stu

Salvo,

What operating system is the Mac?

I think (from my obseravtions) that Lion had some changes over Leopard.

Salvo

With i-tunes you have to manually select the "format" freq depending on the file that's being played. 

Use 44.1 (i.e. no up sampling) unless you're playing hi-res.

And set to 32 bit.

There is little point changing the settings if you are playing standard cd rips.

There are apps that will happily change the settings on the fly. If you have more money than sense, you could pay ammara 800 quid, or there are a number of other apps now for as little as a couple of quid. all work from itunes so you can continue using it as an interface.

Salvo,

            One of the media players that can change the sample rate on the fly and gives a choice of bit no.  is Fidelia. It costs $20US. There's also an advanced version giving further modifications of the digital output. It's written specifically for the Apple O.S. Check out the Audiofile Engineering web site for full details. It uses the i-Tunes music library as well as your own. It will play Wav files and convert files to FLAC as well as many others also.

Just great!! Thank you very much for the link. I have purcahsed the IMac and iPhone apps; They are just great for 22 Euros.

I will test the full quality tomorrow morning when I can up a bit the volume ;-)

Regards,

salvo

The Fidelia iPhone app is quite nice. Overall, Fidelia is excellent, and as sheffieldgraham says, the advanced version takes it to a whole new level.

Dave

Salvo

As mentioned above, Fidelia is excellent. I'm a user and a big fan.

It has to be one of the best $-for-value HiFi bargains out there.

However I have noticed that bare i-tunes is sounding a lot more acceptable since the Lion OS update....it doesn't sound as "bitty".

Bitty.

That a bit little Britan.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOfI48IWESo&feature=player_detailpage

I use Pure Music with my nDAC.  The latest version is a treat.

Try the free trial and see if it is worth the extra money (its much cheaper than Amarra).  You need to use memory play and hog mode for best sound quality.  It loads the tracks into memory and manages system resources to maximise audio quality.  If I unplug my DAC the hog mode switches off.  When I hook up again I can usually hear quite quickly that "hog" needs to be switched back on.  

I tried Amarra with my nDAC on a friends system.  He said it was better than Pure Music so we started with it. I later insisted we try Pure Music and it was easily better sounding.  My friend was surprised and he thought that maybe different DACs prefer different software (he uses a Weiss).  Either way Pure Music and the Naim seem to be a brilliant match on our 2 systems. You use itunes just to manage playback, not to play the music.  I also use the remote app on my ipod touch.

I tried amarra and all I could see was in the default the gain was set a little higher than normal. Once set to standard output gain I personally could not tell what it was supposed to be doing.

I tried pure music as well, be the interface looks like something from 1998, and that was off putting. I also heard no difference.

Great for those that do, but the only advantage to these softwares that I could assertain was the change of output on the fly, and there are plenty of apps doing that now for a few bob.

If you can't hear a difference then save your money.  

That being said, I think everyone running itunes should take advantage of the free trial period to check out the available options in their own system. With a system at the nDAC level there should be a big difference between Amarra and Pure music, either that or you are simply missing out on what the nDAC can do.