Mac OS 10.5.x & iTunes 8 DACMagic Settings

[admin_exported]

I was wondering what to do with the Audio MIDI Settings to get the best out of my CA DACMagic connected via Toslink from my iMac. I have read this document by Benchmark, and have taken on alot of their advice.

There is one aspect that I am not sure about; what to set as the output sample rate and word length. The aforementioned doc suggests (for iTunes 7+) to use 24bit word length the highest sample rate supported by the DAC.

However, as the DACMagic is an upsampling DAC I would imagine that the best practice would be to set the output to be identical to the source i.e. Lossless CD rips with sample rate of 44.1Khz and 16bit word length; thus ensuring that all the upsampling is done in one place (in the DAC) and not by CoreAudio or iTunes.

Can anyone inform me of which is the better configuration?

 

[Craig M.]

setting it to 24 bit won't hurt sound quality. the frequency should be set to whatever file is being played. so for cd rips 44.1. my mac mini didn't need changing.