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First Sonic Impressions of OSX Lion

Listening comparisons were performed on a 2011 MacBook Pro 17” 2.3 GHz Quad Core i7/ 16GB RAM / Vertex 3 240 GB SSD. I have separate partitions for Snow Leopard and Lion. The Wavelength Crimson Silver HS/ Denominator was used for listening with an Audioquest Diamond USB cable.

I initially was going to compare Pure Music /Snow Leopard with Pure Music /Lion. Now remember that Lion does not support Integer mode playback for the generic USB driver I use with the Wavelength DAC. Unfortunately, Pure Music is not ready for Lion; at least with my DAC. Music played pack with distortion, especially with 44.1 files.

The next thing I did was load Decibel, Fidelia, and Audirvana. I am happy to report that these programs worked well with hog enabled.

Most of my listening was done with Decibel, but similar sound characteristics of the operating systems were heard with all three programs. I listened to a variety of music with 44.1 up to 176.4 RR HRx and 192 Channel Classics. Jazz. Pop, and classical music were listened to.

Now for the startling results:

On my system, I preferred Lion.

Snow Leopard seemed darker, slower in transients, and less dynamic than Lion. Lion had a bigger soundstage that was wider and deeper with better detail. In fact, with one of my CDs, the soundstage detail was quite remarkable. There was definitely more air at the high end with Lion; especially with 176.4 and 192 files.

Even without Integer, Lion had better resolution of detail. I suspect on some systems, Lion may sound brighter, but not on my system. All 3 music programs sounded excellent and much better than straight iTunes using Lion.

I found that Lion seems to be more efficient than Snow Leopard even though it is running more background processes. Watching streaming video on both OS showed Snow Leopard using a little bit more memory and CPU on the 2011 MacBook Pro.

Hopefully, in the next few weeks, Pure Music will be ready for the big shoot out with Snow Leopard and Lion. I did not compare the 3 music programs using Lion with Pure Music using Snow Leopard/Integer. I will be trying that test tomorrow.

Steve





Edits: 07/23/11 07/23/11 07/23/11 07/23/11 07/23/11

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Topic - First Sonic Impressions of OSX Lion - Mercman 08:23:20 07/23/11 (15)

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