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[Talos]

I chose MC16 because of its combination of bit-perfect audio (via WASAPI), a killer database, and a well-thought-out user interface.  I am using it on a 2009 MacBook Pro 17" with 8GB RAM running Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit.  I play that in turn into some rather nice high-end hi-fi equipment.  My MacBook will also boot into OSX 10.6 and I was recently persuaded to listen to a music player called Audirvana which runs under OSX.  I have to say that the sound quality played through OSX/Audirvana is really VASTLY superior to that played through Win7/MC16.  I am seriously puzzled as to why that should be, and I would like to read other people's thoughts on this, since I am very new to computer audio.  Do you think it is due to OSX vs Win7, CoreAudio vs WASAI, Audirvana vs MC16, Integer Mode vs Floating Point, or what...?  Do you think I am full of sh#t?...  I am gutted that Audirvana sounds so much better than MC16 (at least on my set-up) because MC16 is SOOOO much easier to use.

[Alex B]

When MC is set to play through WASAPI exlusive the output is literally bit perfect (assuming you have no DSP applied in MC). MC will not then alter the output anyhow.

You didn't say anything about the sound device. Do you use an external DAC that is connected through the built-in S/PDIF output or a device that has its own OS level driver? Is the device exactly the same on both operating systems? Could the OS level device drivers apply some processing?

One reason for the "vastly superior sound quality" (could you please describe the difference) could be a difference in the output volume level. If the volume level difference is not really obvious, a slightly louder output volume level is often perceived as better quality.

I checked the specs at http://www.audirvana.com/Site_2/Audirvana.html and http://code.google.com/p/audirvana/. If the mentioned upsampling feature is causing the difference you can set MC's internal high quality resampler to do the same. However, upsampling does not usually produce any audible quality improvement (at least it does not produce anything like "vastly superior quality") unless the used sound device has really bad quality at the original sample rate (which would be rather unusual).