System Help

[Vincent Kars]

and even though the demo of Pure Vinyl and Amarra, both improved the sound tremendously I would rather keep the signal as clean as possible without internal processing.

There might be a paradox in this.
iTunes re-samples everything to the settings as set in the audio midi panel.
Amarra, PV and PureMusic plays everything at its native sample rate.
Unless your audio matches the settings, iTunes will resample everything so much processing involved.

[mattmerr]

I’m referring to tone/equalization processing rather than sampling rates

[Codifus]

There might be a paradox in this.
iTunes re-samples everything to the settings as set in the audio midi panel.
Amarra, PV and PureMusic plays everything at its native sample rate.
Unless your audio matches the settings, iTunes will resample everything so much processing involved.

I think it's a bit simplistic to say that iTunes resamples everything. Rather, iTunes is understandibly a bit challenging to use bit-perfectly when your music catalog contains files of varying sample rates.

iTunes picks up its deafult sample rate to use from Audi-midi at the time of iTunes launching. So if Audio Midi is set to 44K, launch Itunes and it will play everything at 44K. If Audio Midi is set to 96K, launch Itunes and it will play everything at 96K.

Fortunately for me, all my music files are 44K. I leave audio midi at 44K and ITunes plays all my data bit perfectly.

If my iTunes library contained music of varying sample rates, I would set Audio midi to the highest sample rate, say 96K. That way, iTunes plays 96K files bit-perfectly and 44K files, while not bit perfect, are upsampled by iTunes. I believe that Benchmark's website has outlined this and has gone on to say that the upsampler within iTunes is very good. You have to make sure and avoid any sample rate adjustments from the OS, whose upsampling quality is not that great.

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[mattmerr]

So it is better to buy the best internal soundcard you can, so any upsampling will be done with more finesse?

[Codifus]

So it is better to buy the best internal soundcard you can, so any upsampling will be done with more finesse?

Kinfod sortof. iTunes will still be upsampling. With the better soundcard you get potentially higher sample rate output, up to 192 Khz I believe. The real benefit, however, would be the co-axial or optical output on the soundcard. It's been said that the optical output built into the macintosh motherboard is very jittery. A soundcard like the LynxTWO will give you world class digital outputs quality to feed your Caiman/7520.

My airport express is well known to have a jittery optical output yet I am totally loving my setup now so I suggest you try the motherboard 1st to see how you like it. It's free and its right there

Definitely get a good optical cable, too. Plastic is fantastic

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