XXHE vs. Amarra

[Marcin_gps]

Yesterday Macbook Pro got into my hands and I figured to do some comparisons and satisfy my curiosity. I downloaded Amarra Mini demo and newest drivers for my M-Audio Transit USB card, which in both cases were used only as a digital transport to feed Beresford TC-7510 DAC.
The same volume and tracks were used. The only difference was that on a PC, the player was XXHE and on Macbook Pro (with and without PSU) - iTunes 9.1 + Amarra Mini.  Two seconds after I pushed play in iTunes, I knew it was far from XXHighEnd when it comes to all aspects of sound characteristics. I am really disappointed with Mac-based audio playback. I don't know how much would change if I had tweaked Mac OS. I know that with  my PC it has a great impact and brings SQ level up, but much of that lays in hardware tweaks and there is not much to be done in Macbook when it comes to hardware tricks. XXHE FTW!!!

[Telstar]

Thanks for this comparison
I was waiting for it for awhile.

[Suteetat]

I tried Amarra/MacBook Pro vs PC/Lynx/XXHighend about 3-4 months ago. It was not the latest XXHighend version however. I think it was even before special mode was introduced or was just introduced or something but certainly not the adaptive mode.
At that time, Amarra/MacBook with Weiss INT202 firewire/AES-EBU converter sounded better than Vista/XXHighend using the same Weiss INT202 interface.
However, at the same time, I found PC/Lynx to sound better in my system than using Weiss INT202 for whatever reason. Mac/INT202 and PC/Lynx/XXHighend sounded quite similar.

More recently, a friend bought over MacMini with Bolder linear Power Supply/Pure Music using glass fiber toslink connection to my DAC, the current XXHighend/Win7/Lynx sounded better.