Overall, I actually really enjoyed my Foobar2000 experience. Soundstage: The panning of instruments and sounds was more diffused in Audirvana Plus, whereas it felt more distinct in Foobar (a more rigid left, centre, and right). Still, Foobar maintained a nice kick and rhythm. I could tolerate the treble of HD 800 through Foobar, but the lifelessness in vocals was the dealbreaker.īass texture and slam: Audirvana won this in every way technically possible. It felt dry, recessed, and lacking in resolution and dynamics. I couldn't focus on aspects like imaging or decay too much because the mid range on Foobar simply didn't hold up. Mid range: This is where Audirvana was leagues apart. Foobar just shifts the stage away from you. On the other hand, anything placed at the front of the recording is held in front of your face. With Foobar, anything placed in the rear of the recording is near your ear or slightly forward. So with Audirvana, anything that is in front, feels in front of your ears, and anything in rear sounds behind your ear. Audirvana throws a soundstage where you are in the middle of the stage. Stage presentation: Foobar with HD 800 throws a soundstage that it ahead of you completely. Whereas, on Audirvana, it's done a lot more naturally with dynamics to spare. Top end had more airy feel, but it felt more forced and synthetic. Treble - treble energy was elevated in general on Foobar. Through Audirvana Plus, it was completely removed and only present in very bad recordings. I can now totally understand why some people might say that HD 800 needs mod or tube amps. Sibilance was very noticeable through Foobar. I was a bit out of my element as I hadn't properly used a windows machine in many years. So I played it straight out of the stock Foobar. It's apparently good for live playback with low latency, but creates problems as well on certain computers. I checked up on hydrogen audio and they basically said not to bother with it for playback purposes. Only used my HD 800 for this test.įor some reason I wasn't able to install WASAPI or ASIO. Digital out volume was maxed on both setups to be fair. I tested the same FLAC albums on each laptop at same headphone volume output on my Dangerous Source. Meanwhile, nothing like that was enabled on the windows machine. I also run my Audirvana Plus on extreme under "SysOptimizer" FWIW. It had a hard drive, whereas my Mac runs on SSD. I simply don't want to wait right now for it to boot up. The Windows machine on the other hand was a HP laptop - Intel Core duo with 2GB of RAM and clocked at about 2GHz (forgot the processor as well).
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January 2023
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