amarra or pure music..?

Maybe the question of system matching is coming into play here with Pure Music and Amarra as other posters stated they prefered one of these computer programs over the other. I certainly don't consider hearing both PM and Amarra through Vandersteen 5a to be the ultimate test of the two programs--despite Vandersteen's strong virtues these speakers lack state of the art drivers.

I took another listen to both Pure Music and Amarra as I own both and I can confirm there definately is an audible difference on my system (EE MiniMax Plus DAC and Paradigm Signature S1 V.3)between these two FLAC player programs. Amarra sounds richer, warmer and more satisfying with Pure Music sounding leaner, especially in the high frequencies.

I've purchased both Amarra and Pure Music, but Audirvana Plus is my current player of choice.

Bbopman - The only thing that can change sound, if digital file is the same, is jitter (it was verified by Stereophile that Airport Express transmission is bit-perfect).

Music stored on the hard drive has not timing. Music is transferred to AE compressed (ALAC) in packets and buffered (few seconds buffer). Timinig is created by AE. I cannot imagine how playback program could change sound with wireless AE unless CD was ripped differently (Itunes does not rip bit-perfect).

Audirvana Plus has, for example, the Izotope 64-bit resampler. Multiple dimensions of configuration which allow you to do things like apply a minimum apodizing filter. So aside from jitter, there are some things that may affect the sound.