Sonic Studio's Black Friday Sale
99.8.80.50 |
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| Posted on November 25, 2015 at 08:49:01 | ||
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Posts: 914
Location: South East Michigan Joined: October 2, 2004 |
Just got the following email from Sonic Studio's on their 50% Off Sale. I made a purchase, and thought others might me interested in this sale, especially MAC guys. Bought the SQ+. I have no association with them. Not sure if you have to be on their mailing list to get the discount: "It's that special time of year: the holidays are upon us and we want you and those you care for to have easy access to the best sound available. Now through the end of November, we're making Sonic Studio's Award-winning Amarra products available to you for 50%* off! Amarra Players, Streamers and Room Correction software, new products and upgrades, are all part of the sale. Don't miss this great opportunity to make Amarra part of your playback toolkit!.."
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| RE: Promo Code, posted on November 26, 2015 at 12:53:01 | |
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Posts: 319
Joined: March 9, 2005 |
Thanks to you and Sonic Studios.
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| RE: What other Amarra product do you suggest for those who want to get into Computer stored music ?, posted on November 29, 2015 at 07:29:55 | |
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Posts: 46302
Location: USA Joined: June 22, 2001 Contributor Since: February 2, 2002 |
Amarra software used to be ridiculously expensive costing thousands of dollars and it came with a USB security dongle that had to be plugged in to enable the software. That was years ago when Amarra was first to the computer audio audiophile market. They had no competition and were able to charge whatever they wanted. Once ridiculously expensive they are now cheap but ridiculously complex in their software product offerings, many of which appear to have specialized applications and some that overlap in functionality. SQ+ appears to be geared toward improving the quality of streaming audio from services like Spotify, Pandora, Amazon Music, Apple Music, etc. Most of these services stream relatively low quality lossy compressed music over the internet. The sound quality is acceptable to some but many users including myself can easily hear the difference between these services and their own CD files 'ripped' to their computer disk drives. If streaming services are your main application then SQ+ is probably not a bad choice. If your main application is playback of local music files from your Mac then the main stream $99 Amarra software is probably the one you want, assuming you go with Amarra to begin with. There are several other excellent choices available these days which is a good thing. I use Audirvana Plus or Pure Music on my Mac. These can be used 'stand alone' or in conjunction with iTunes. When used in 'integrated mode' with iTunes, you continue to use iTunes to manage your music library and as your main user interface, but Apple's Core Audio is bypassed for higher quality sound. These software packages also offer other benefits like disabling some Operating System features to again improve the sonics and 'memory play' to pre-load music files into RAM so your disk is not being accessed at all during playback. This is also said to improve the sonics in some situations. These software packages include many other features geared toward incrementally improving the sonics. All you need is a decent USB DAC, USB cable, and one of these software packages (with or without iTunes) to get started. You can store your music on your local disk or an external disk. Your choice.
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