StudioSound
100+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- Nov 24, 2012
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This is nothing to do with DAC functionality and is encoded into the audio file itself. If samples above 22kHz were not filtered out before encoding the audio, you would be encoding the resulting aliasing into the file.it circumvents the need for the sharp filtering needed around 22kHz using 44.1kHz samplerate ie similar to using a very slow filter instead.
The exception is the playback of DSD and DXD files in real-time - native DSD files need a lowpass filter applied to them, because DSD contains a lot of ultrasonic noise, and DXD files are often sourced from DSD masters that did not filter out the ultrasonic noise.
I think this can also be seen in files from places like HDtracks as well.
Most DAC chips (apart from the latest DSD-capable ones) should sound better around 96kHz. However some devices may internally resample everything to their maximum rate regardless of what you send it (actually, most probably do this now) so what you might be experiencing is better quality upsampling on the PC (or at least different upsampling) than the device is doing internally.Yes, as I said it all depends on which DAC-chip is used and possibly the implementation on the circuit board itself, it's not universal. However the cheap Soundblaster Z seems to benefit from running at 192kHz rather than 96kHz!
I think the Sabre DACs are operating in the megahertz range internally regardless of what the input is. (they need to be capable of it, because they support native DSD)That 48 (or 96) kHz can do quite a bit better than 44.1 (or 88.2) kHz is obvious since cheap products use only one clock, but saying that near 200 kHz it performs better would mean that they (deliberately?) made the product perform worse at 96 kHz.
What Chodi describes is likely a difference in the way that resampling is handled in his player, or simply placebo.
I like a player that handles all formats equally well. Few players seem to be decoding lossy formats in 32-bit. JRiver does a great job handling all formats, and has a very powerful database engine running in the background, so you can essentially have it split how your library is handled based on the file types if you prefer.I like having my MP3 and FLAC library separate.
I really like Winamp, but I only use it for my MP3 songs. I'm now trying Mediamonkey, Musicbee and Helium Music Manager to use for my FLAC library.