This came up in conversation with the chap who runs Item Audio and I wondered of any AOSers using a Mac as their music source had any views.

My (probably rubbish) understanding is that iTunes has a particular 'sound' and handles music files in a certain way, thus influencing the digital output.

Amarra seems to be a plug-in which interfaces with and takes over the way core audio is handled and (aledgedly) results is a more accurate version being passed via the digital output, and thus to the DAC.

If anyone has got views, I'd love to hear them.

I use PLEX (basically a Mac dedicated kind of XBMC) to access all my media and it interfaces with iTunes. What I don't know (but have asked) is to what degree PLEX actually uses iTunes when playing music. Personally I only think it uses the library info, as you can add music sources other than iTunes (i.e. a drive full of FLAC files) but I'd like to know.