amarra or pure music..?

For what it's worth, I think Audirvana Plus sounds every bit as good as Amarra and is only $49 and unlike Amarra, Audirvana is much more stable and reliable.

There's also BitPerfect, which is downloadable for the Mac from Apple's App Store. $5. It's the most minimalist of all of these and works behind the scenes very reliably as you use iTunes to control your music. Switches between sample rates (an essential reason to have one of these players being discussed, since iTunes won't do this properly), supports integer mode capable DACs, and offers choices around upsampling (or not).

I spent the last two weeks seriously evaluating the latest version of PM vs. Amarra. Quick summary: PM is rock solid, very clean and gives a very big detailed sound stage. But, at least in my system, Amarra is much more musical and enjoyable. In fact, Amarra really crosses the border for me from “digital playback” to “music playback.”

Details: rather than “A/B” the two programs, I listened to entire pieces with one program then did the same with the other. At one point, about half way into listening to a Johann Johannsson symphony (orchestral and electronic) my wife turned to me and said, “this is really clear, but it just doesn’t have the emotional connection of listening to it on (Amarra).” Which is a pretty good summary.

To paraphrase what Audioengr pointed out up thread, there seems to be a trade off between smoothness and liveliness. I suspect that in an all tube, super smooth playback system PM might be the better choice. Note that Jon DeVore, who I have immense respect for, used PM in his DeVore Fidelity T.H.E. CES demo room – in an all tube system. In my case, this playback system is all solid state and probably a tad on the analytical side.

Two other notes: even though I use TacT room correction and my listening room is highly treated with RPG products, I still like the occasional “tone control” for playback. The Amarra Sonic EQ, available on the full player, is the best digital EQ I’ve ever heard. It sounds like the analog Cello Audio Pallet EQ I used to use at home and professionally – still my favorite. As to the price? Yes, there are cheaper players but in a community where spending five figures on system cables doesn’t raise eyebrows is $800 a showstopper?

Which is not to say there aren’t some tradeoffs. The PM code is super stable vs. the current version of Amarra, which is a little glitchy for me. Bottom line: since both programs are available free to demo (how great is that?) I highly recommend downloading both and then spending some time with each in your system to see which one is a better fit for you.