Ham Sandwich
Headphoneus Supremus
- Joined
- May 22, 2006
- Posts
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My philosophy about this is to set up a system (hardware and software) that is capable of playing bit-perfect. Then once that is achieved I fiddle and do things like digital EQ, resampling, digital volume adjustment like replay gain, a slight digital volume decrease to prevent peaks from going over full scale, things like that. So I go through the works and setup to make things bit-perfect then immediately mess it up. And that's the way I want it usually most of the time.
If you happen to have a DAC that can decode HDCD and you play a ripped file that has HDCD encoding then that is one time where you want (need) bit-perfect all the way through to the DAC. If the software messes with the bits and isn't bit-perfect then the DAC won't see a valid HDCD signal and you won't get the HDCD decoding. If the software does everything bit-perfect then the DAC will see the HDCD signal and decode it.
If you happen to have a DAC that can decode HDCD and you play a ripped file that has HDCD encoding then that is one time where you want (need) bit-perfect all the way through to the DAC. If the software messes with the bits and isn't bit-perfect then the DAC won't see a valid HDCD signal and you won't get the HDCD decoding. If the software does everything bit-perfect then the DAC will see the HDCD signal and decode it.