Hi michael, the issue is not about sonic quality, but being able to use VST3 plugins in JRiver as most of the plugin vendors have moved to VST3. There are a number of improvement made with VST3, but these are mostly related to developers of plugins and not sonic improvements:
https://www.steinberg.net/en/company/technologies/vst3.htmlThe issue is a licensing issue for plugin developers. Some plugin developers would like to be able to support JRiver by offering their plugins. But if the developer did not sign a licensing agreement with Steinberg back in 2018, then they cannot license the VST2 SDK and therefore cannot offer a plugin for JRiver...
Dirac has a licensing agreement with Steinberg, so they are able to offer both legacy (i.e. VST2) and the newer VST3 format plugins and indeed from a sonic perspective, are identical.