Originally Posted by
Davo
Rather than set your system to always spit out 24/96 (which will then use the internal rate converter of your PC or Mac) the goal should be to output bit perfect, transparent audio to your hifi components. This means if all of your material is ripped CD's at 16/44.1 then set your optimum Output settings in OSX are 16/44.1 as default.
Hi Davo!
Thanks for your advice and you are quite right indeed, however this is what's known as pilot answering. If you read through every post on the thread you'll see that over the time period of the thread I've moved away from a 24bit output back to a 16bit output (for Redbook) as I found the effects of aliasing quite noticeable when I did more back-to-back listening comparisons. Now I use 16bit/44.1Khz output for anything ripped from Redbook (albeit ripped using 32bit Linear PCM and with my DAC auto-upsampling to 176.4Khz) and I use 24bit/96Khz output for playback of 96/24 master tracks downloaded from iTrax. The 96/24 masters are nothing short of breathtaking!
Ok, this means a lot of too-ing and fro-ing as far as Audio Midi set-up goes but the results are definitely worth it and as there's no alteration to the original word length or upsampling of a non-directly divisable frequency, there's no (discernable to my ears) aliasing.
Ben Duncan mains conditioner
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Samsung QE75Q90T 75" QLED TV
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RME Audio ADI-2 FS (AK4493) DAC
Chord Clearway XLR interconnects
Audioquest Crimson USB interconnect
QED Quartz Reference optical interconnect
Edifier S3000 Pro active speakers
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