96khz/24bit audio help

[viator122]

Hi everyone,
Yesterday I was talking to a friend who has taped and posted about 20 shows to www.archive.org. I told him I would listen to some of his stuff because I love live recordings and I know he's good at it. He told me don't bother because they are all in 96khz/24bit format and most computers can't play that. He said the 96/24 is dvd quality and that you'd have to burn it to a dvd or resample it down to 48/16. Can anyone tell me more about this? Is there really not an easy way to play these files?

Thanks in advance.

 

[lan]

Winamp and foobar can play 24/96 files just fine. It'll sound best if your card was 24/96 or higher but if it's lower like 16/48 or 16/44.1, you can just have those media players downsample.

 

[Mr.Radar]

The best way to playback 24/96 files on a computer with a soundcard that doesn't support 24/96 is to get Foobar2000 and use the following configuration:
Resampler DSP to 48 KHz
Kernel Streaming or ASIO output method if the driver supports it (otherwise DirectSound)
16-bit fixed point output data format
Strong ATH Noise Shaping dither

Or you could buy the Chaintech AV-710 for $24 and use it's high sample rate mode which operates at 24/96 to get the full high-rez experience.

 

[adhoc]

..you might also want to know that resampling with strong noise shaping, being a processor and hdd intensive process, is not a recommended path for anything other than relatively manly computers. well, at least if you want to do anything else on your computer while listening to music.