timanderson

Thanks for the response, but how severe are these distortions? Do you have some numbers? I can make a PCM recording at 24/96 or even 16/44 without any obvious distortion. Also, you can test transparency reasonably well by switching an ADC/DAC process in and out of the audio chain and listening to, and/or measuring, the difference. My impression is that it is transparent for music at normal listening levels. Tim

Is there any hard evidence, as opposed to anecdote, that PCM is not transparent to the source, in terms of what the human ear can hear? Probably the same is true of DSD. In which case, what does it matter, except that PCM is more convenient because we can easily rip, play back at different resolutions and so on?

Hi Mitch, did you repeat your experiment with the Hilo and if so what was the outcome? I agree with the downsample, upsample, compare with original approach. This seems to me fair, as upsampling to 24/192 and playing the upsampled file is merely another way of playing a 16/44 file, you could do the same with any 16/44 source.