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In Reply to: RE: Test with 24/96 vs. 16/44 LITTLE TO NO DIFFERENCE. posted by Archimago on February 13, 2010 at 09:00:59
But I got some 24/96 music from HDTracks.com, converted to Apple Lossless, and dropped into iTunes. Thought they sounded great through my new DAC, which is hooked up to the iMac via TOSLINK. Come to find out that the iMac is only outputting 16/44 audio by default, and if the digital cable is unplugged, it always reverts to that. Whoops. So this time I ensure that iMac is indeed putting out 24/96, but I don't hear a magical transformation. Maybe a vague sense that the higher-res music has a better sense of presence. Worse, if I leave the iMac set to 24/96 all the time, it seems to me that my regular 16/44 tracks actually sound a bit worse. Somehow more muddled. Hmm.
Follow Ups:
16/44 probably sounded worse because of the asynchronous (non-multiple) upsampling to 24/96 on the Mac. Does the Mac have 24/88 option? It should sound pretty good upsampling to that.
This is why it is handy to have a DAC that shows you what sample rate it is using (e.g. if you are playing a 44k file and your DAC says it is using 96K, something unexpected, and probably harmful, is happening to your audio data).In general, you don't want ANY resampling to be happening during audio playback. Yes, there are *rare* exceptions, usually due to poorly implemented hardware that is doing its own resampling, badly, later in the chain, so a better resampler can *sometimes* help earlier in the data chain.
Edits: 02/14/10
Home theater receivers are often useful to check out what the digital signal actually is.
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