hfvienna

The cheapest and easiest solution I would try is the Audioquest Jitterbug, which filters USB Signal AND Power to a certain extent for just a couple of bucks.. If you want to get serious I would look at home , these guys are providing professional links between source and DAC. As @mmerill99 already noted , its always a trial game here , cause every setup is special in case of grounding, noise path etc.

If you are a listener, best sounding album means: Where do I get the most goosebumps, which album opens my heart widest, where do my eyes get wet? You already have the answer " Live in Paris ". "A case of you" is a track I have listened hundreds of times and will do even more so. To judge its not so good because not available as HiRes sounds ... strange to me. Even as technician and some education in sound engineering I frankly dont give a damn for best sounding but less interesting records/files. Older members may recall the piano playing of Lincoln Mayorga on "Direct to Disc" Recordings. I prefer Friedrich Gulda on an upright bar piano recorded on cassette tape if available. And because Im in a good mood , I dont refer to the DSD catalogs available ...

Yes it does. iTunes is just sending the file to the external DAC , only of you use internal output like headphone jack it downsamples to 96kHz which is the limit for internal player.

How long does it take until people understand that asking for "the best" does not make any sense, until they tell us best what! In terms of streaming services this could be "biggest selection of titles overall , classic music , jazz , hiphop or god knows what is your favourite music . Or it could be sound quality. On low bandwith connection or on T1 backbone. Or best proce ? Or best looking website ? I would suggest to block automatically all requests for "the best" .

Get a Chord MOJO and outperform all other proposals made here up to now and for quite a while in future.

Are you sure about that? According to my experience all Macs have optical out , its just the same output as headphone analog. So try an Fiber Optic Toslink to 3.5mm Mini Connector Adapter and you will see the red light which means "green light" for optical out here.

Upsampling of course can't produce a better quality file , because the quality is not getting better if you take everything times 2 or 4 and divide it later again by 2 or 4. But it definitely can help , providing a file with a higher sampling frequency, which leaves more space between the highest parts of the sampled signal and the critical point where - due to the nature of decoding - the limit of usable area ends. So the decoding process can be managed with not so steeply rising filters, which diminishes the phase distortion of the signal. In other words you don't gain quality at producing the higher sampled file but in decoding a file in a softer manner.

Thx likethesoup2 , I have same experience now and then. But you are frighten me with the info that iFi is windows based , up to now I have loved their products ;-)

No firmware update possible with a Mac ?? Really ?? Any company who forces people to go for a windows computer to upgrade the firmware should be punished with 5000 hours of system updates per month . Oops , I think thats not a punishment but just normal life for them anyhow ;-) . Shame on you ifies !

XLD treats your albums like albums together with iTunes X Lossless Decoder: Lossless audio decoder for Mac OS X , but not integrated , its a seperate piece of free software and thats good , cause it does not interfere with apples update machanisms like plugins do.

Your issue can be solved easily , get XLD for Mac and convert your files into any format , bitdepth or sample rate you can work with . I would keep the original , maybe later you ca handle 192/24 too. But you want notice much difference to 96/24 . And spend the guy from XLD some bucks for his great work after download. .

Hi Chris Your 7 reasons are all very well thought-out, every one of it has a bit of truth in it , and if Apple would be a normal computer/music/mobile company you maybe could have nailed it. But if Apple would be that kind of company they wouldn't have made a lot of things they did, and would not be in the rile they are today . Carries want this , record labels want that. Apple has proven already so many times that they don't spend a lot of times caring about what potential business partners want to save their bucks. The Beats thing is quite a complex matter, but I assume it does not relate to high Definition sound for now as their headphones and streaming quality has proven. Could come later in the reasoning , even bigger is better plays some role here . Which leads us to specs and the technical support in apps. Yes I agree that Apple has never been a spec company, but even so they have to coop with a market that demands bigger and better from time to time . Nobody has really experienced the speed difference between 2.3 and 2.5 Gigahertz CPU , but it plays a role in deciding if it does not cost too much more. Nobody may really hear the difference between 16/44 and 24/96 (if everything else is same !) , but it just feels better to be on save side with some higher resolution. And this is feeling and emotion , and suddenly it makes sense to go for HD even logical it does not.

Michael Gees is definitely one to follow , since I discovered his "Improvisaties" on a DCS Demo download . Listen and buy it from here

Producing records or hires files is one thing, distribution another (most of the times). You asked for examples of their production as downloads and these you can find at the site I recommended. Recorded material from the sessions is usually mastered into appropriate material for production of CDs , SACDs , Bluerays , HiRes Files or whatever will come later. NOBODY is offering the original recording material and thats for a good reason ( Google for mastering audio ) .

Their recordings are outstanding as you can hear on the DCS site dCS: ONLY THE MUSIC. Highly recommended.