HiRes streaming from Itunes - some queries...

[Terry Dactyl]

I've just dipped my toe into streamed music by buying a Monitor Audio Airstream A100 DAC/amp. My music, stored on my laptop, is a mixture of CD rips, vinyl conversions and Itunes downloads, and the former two are mainly in Apple Lossless format. The music is backed up onto a 2TB Western Digital 'My Book Live' drive which comes with something called 'Twonky Media'.

I'm streaming my music from Itunes, which is what Monitor Audio recommend. Since buying the A100 I've bought a 24/96 download from Naim Label. Am I right to assume that through Itunes I'm listening to the music at 24/96? I've read elsewhere that Itunes only goes up to CD quality. (I'm using the version of Itunes that was current a month ago, not the version that came out a week or so ago).

The A100 supports resolutions up to 24/192 "via DLNA". I have no idea if my laptop's sound card supports that (6-week old Lenovo laptop with Conexant HD audio).

I did download a trial of JRiver, but found it overly complicated compared to Itunes. As such I didn't pay for the full version. There may be other programs out there that are more suitable.

What I'm trying to achieve is to utilise the 24/192 ability of the A100. Can you guys advise me as to the best way to achieve this? Incidentally I have no idea what DLNA is.

Thanks

 

[MajorFubar]

Sadly I'm no expert on the PC version of iTunes, I use it on a Mac. From that perspective I can categorically state that iTunes definitely does support hi-res playback, but on the Mac at least, it doesn't switch the bit-depth and bit-rate on the DAC properly, you have to do that manually through Audio Midi Setup, or use a plugin such as BitPerfect which does it for you. I'm not really sure what the PC's equivalent of that is, or even whether it's needed on a PC. Hopefully someone will come along with more experience of using iTunes on Windows and give you a better answer.

Alternatively you could move away from using iTunes as a PC media player altogether.

PS welcome to the forum