Is it my streamer or does Audirvana sounds better?

@analogfan  I’ve used Audirvana for years now, running on an old Mac Mini with an Uptone DC supply.  It’s always sounded great.  Part of the magic is the pre-loading and conversion of files to PCM.  It recently updated itself to 3.0 and everything went awry, but after a few discussions at the forum the problems were fixed.  However, I still prefer the sound of 2.11, which a forum member kindly sent me to restore.  It just sounds more solid and realistic to me.

analougefan:  I'm really interested in this thread because I'm probably going to buy the Garlubidor Divinity and was considering the Eversolo T8 as the streaming transport.  Curious that you thought that the Audirvana was a better option.  Is it that much better?  I'd rather not have to use a MacBook.  Thanks for your reply.

I enjoyed Audirvana via a Mac Mini stripped down for music only, and was very happy with the sound. But I had technical issues with memory management and some other issues, so switched to an Innuos Zen Mk3 from TMR and didn’t look back. The Zen is a nice piece of gear.

How have you got your Garlubidor divinity r2r DAC and Audirvana set up?

Were you using USB from the T8?

Reading about the Audirvana it appears they have implemented excellent upsampling and noise reduction algorithms.  Is your DAC running "native" or upsampling? If the Audirvana was upsampling and the streamers were not, and your DAC is not upsampling the that could account for your computer sounding better.

Also, the T8 has a slightly hidden, but critical to turn on, setting that prevents the T8's Android OS from resampling everything to 48khz.   You must also configure the T8 outputs to support hi-res transfer to the DAC.

I'd suggest looking critically at your T8 and DAC settings to ensure you are getting the best SQ.  I use a T8 as the transport into an Esoteric K-01XDSE DAC and it is superb.  And DO USE USB.

When I first started to put together an ever-evolving system I used JBL305s and a JBL 310s subwoofie. I had some major bass phase or time delay issues that only Audirvana solved. I used the download non-subscription version. I really liked the usability as well- having my local files available and streaming presets. I have moved up a bit into bottom mid-tier equipment and moved away from a computer streaming-render source but let me tell ya lads, Audirvana on my MacBook Pro was good.