Oversampling

[MajorFubar]

While I wait for the BitPerfect guys to release an update to make it fully comptable with El Capitan (which I'm running on my 2010 Mac Mini as part of the beta test programme), I've been playing iTunes without it, which, where apropriate, has required me to manually set the bit-depth and sample rate accordingly using the Audio Midi Setup tool for my handful of hi-res albums. Leaving it set to 24/96 after listening the excellent HD download of the Hotel California master (which I just never get tired of listening to), CBA set in and using the Remote app from my phone, I started listening to some of my regular CD rips without changing back to 16/44.1.

I wasn't expecting to hear any difference, and was surprised that I could. Some tracks on the More Than This album (greatest hits of Bryan Ferry & Roxy Music) I find can sound a bit sharp, especially the horns, but suddenly they did not. Everything sounded smoother and more natural. Less stressed, if you will. Dare I say it, but less digital. From this I went on to listen to the Private Collection album by Jon & Vangelis. Often I find this album difficult to listen to from a digital source and is one of the albums I prefer on vinyl, because from CD I find Jon Anderson's vocals can sound shrieky in places, e.g.: on the otherwise excellent track He Is Sailing. Yet this time I found it much more listenable and even found myself turning it up not down.

What could cause this? Difficult to say as I'm not sufficiently technically-minded. But if I'd traded-in my HRT II+ against a new DAC costing a couple of hundred more and got this result, I would have considered it a worthwhile upgrade.

 

[Chris Firth]

The DAC is using a different filter because of it receiving the 24/96 stream.

The 24 bit isn't doing it, but the 96 part is.

CD (16/44.1) has a brick wall filter at 22KHZ - it's there to stop ringing artifacts affecting the audible part.

24/96 has a filter at 48KHz - it's far higher in frequency, and well beyond the the range of human hearing, and as a result the filter doesn't have to be as radically implemented.

 

[MajorFubar]

Thanks for the explanation, thought it was something like that. I'm aware the 24bit will have made no difference; I should have clarified that. The source is 16bit so the remaining 8 bits will simply be unused. I guess technically if I'm going to do this properly I should select 88.2kHz because at least that's a direct multiple of 44.1.

To be honest I'm happy if someone came along and argued that I'm kidding myself. Maybe I am, but as a consequence of my being too bone idle to walk 15ft across the room to reset the sample frequency on the DAC, I reckon I've discovered the best completely free upgrade I've ever made to my system. Sadly I don't know how Windows users could force their computers to do the same thing. I'm sure it's possible, I've just been away from the platform so long that I can't remember how to set up the hardware like this on Windows PCs.

 

[mitchellhatpeg]

If you fancy 768kHz oversampling...try this...http://www.homehifi.co.uk/S/7534f.htm.

The Beresford Caiman Mk ii is a DAC, pre-amp, headphone amp I have been looking at myself...having dificulty choosing between it and the iFi nano idsd...former has a pre-amp but more restricted file handling...latter handles all file types and is compatable with ios decices, but cannot be used as a pre-amp.