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Moving to the final two contenders one does enter true high-end audio as the ability to resolve fine details, ambient cues and tonal veracity move up quite a few levels over the first two pieces of software. They all play music but true high fidelity is found in the finest and faintest nuances like I was reminded recently when listening to a very finely tuned system in Montreal (more on this shortly). The differences with my system were not so much on the big obvious things, they were in the most subtle nuances, in the silences between notes, in the fabric of music itself, bringing notes together rather than playing them separately. That's what you get with Pure Music and Audirvana if the rest of your setup allows. That said they are not exactly identical even though more similar than different.
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Both build on the features offered by Decibel and provide native DSD playback as described by Srajan in a previous review. Only owning a few DSD-encoded files and still smarting over the stubborn inflexibility of Sony to keep SACD a closed format (which means that for now the DSD layer of my SACD collection is quite useless), I decided to ignore this feature for now and focus on the rest of the audio world. From this point forward the two softwares diverge significantly in their feature sets if not audio qualities. To keep it simple, Pure Music is the more complete of the two, enabling complex digital signal processing and multi-channel audio. At $129 this is priceless if you need these functions (think room correction or complex multi-channel setups) but it adds far more options than are necessary for most stereo systems.
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The Pure Music website offers plenty of great material to study and guide you through the optimization of a computer audio system but the program itself does not perform any of these steps for you besides managing the data stream in the most optimized way. What comes with this complexity are at times challenges to take full advantage of the potential of the software as well as stability issues which will be more or less pronounced depending on system. For example when Pure Music is engaged (which requires iTunes to be open at all times) and you try to play a movie, you will either be faced with no sound (at best), a frozen image (most often) or a completely frozen computer (on occasion). I tried the "more is less mode" and other proposed solutions to no avail. On my Mac mini, Pure Music and video just hate each other.
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In addition, as my mini is connected to a large-screen TV via HDMI, I can pretty much guarantee that if the TV goes to sleep while Pure Music is activated, the computer will freeze when the TV restarts. Neither are huge issues but they demonstrate that stability is not quite optimized yet in Pure Music, at least not to the extent as Audirvana where none of these issues ever happened. That said, these glitches need to be kept in perspective. Pure Music is a music player software. When used for this purpose, it works flawlessly. The only users who may have issues will be those who use their computers for audio and video playback.
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