Question about dac and more

[nuggets]

I bought this external soundcard called Audiophile USB. My question is should I play tracks in 16-bit or 24-bit mode?. What's the difference?.

I also got a yamaha cd player but I wanna know will my cd's sound better if I rip them in lossless format and listen on computer or listen straight from the cd player.

Thanks

 

[Uncle Erik]

You bought the M-Audio external Audiophile, right? Good card. I just pulled some stats, and I'm not sure if it upsamples to 24bit/96kHz, or if it just supports files up to that resolution. Simply put, the more bits and higher the sampling rate, the better the resolution of the music. Redbook CDs (your typical CD) is recorded at 16bit/44.1kHz. So what an upsampler does is take the Redbook track and dither it into a higher resolution. If it doesn't upsample, it'll just play back your file at 16bit/44.1kHz, though it would play back at 24bit/96kHz if, say, you plugged in a microphone and recorded yourself playing the guitar at that resolution.

At any rate, it wouldn't hurt to try 24bit playback. If it upsamples, you might like the sound better. If not, it won't change anything.

As for playing CDs or ripping in lossless, they're pretty much the same. There are some slight differences (look at other threads here) but for me, they sound the same. What is nice is that you can arrange ripped tracks into playlists, etc. and you won't have to swap discs. Or hunt for one, either.