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The very different Rickie Lee and Norah Jones sounded like themselves, as did my beloved classical singers in all ranges. Its basic tonality was essentially the same as that of the dCS Rossini DAC/clock/transport combination it communicated the unique timbres of instruments and voices regardless of title or genre. In its ability to transmit music without undue coloration, the Wolf Alpha 3 SX was a winner.įrom the very first notes, the Alpha 3 SX's neutrality came as a breath of fresh air. If it's filled with foreboding and anguish, I can handle it, and if it's brilliantly illumined with color and happiness, I want to feel it all. If a recording is brash, let it be brash I'll turn down the volume or hold my ears. I prefer my music neither warmed over nor darkened. Ripping a CD using the server's Asunder app—the app amongst the several provided that Joe prefers for CD ripping—was fairly easy, went quite fast, and delivered sound consistent with Red Book downloads and streams of the same material. Remote data manipulation was required to organize my frequently used Lou Harrison tracks and the album Translations, recording engineer/technical editor John Atkinson's recent Portland State Chamber Choir recording of the music of Eriks Ešenvalds.

Of the tracks and albums on my four USB sticks, JRiver consigned many of them to "Unknown" and scrambled others. Roon is hardly perfect on the metadata front, but in many respects it tops JRiver, which can't, for example, display album tracks in numerical order if track numbers don't appear first in the data string. In order to easily find the MQA version of Will.i.am's title track from #thatPower, featuring Justin Bieber (16/44.1 FLAC, Interscope Records UICS-9136/7), it was necessary for Joe to remotely add "MQA" to its title so I could differentiate it from its non-MQA brother. If you've got two versions of the same album—eg, MQA and non-MQA—you can't distinguish between them without hitting "play" and then looking at your DAC's display. Beyond the sonic considerations—discussed below—JRiver doesn't thoroughly integrate Tidal and Qobuz, will neither decode nor render MQA (although it will pass it), can't access liner notes, and won't display resolution. He indicated that their sound was very close—depending upon their latest upgrades, sometimes Roon edged ahead by a few points, only to be surpassed by the next version of JRiver, which he ultimately preferred. While I could have used virtually any good-sounding playback software with the Alpha 3 SX, Joe urged me to stick to the two music-server programs that he had thoroughly vetted: JRiver 24 and the latest version of Roon.