New to forum with a couple of questions

[TimU]

Hello everybody, I am new to the forum (and relatively new to the hobby). I am considering a modestly priced DAC, and Cambridge Audio Dac Magic plus seems a popular choice with a versatile feature set. However, I believe the DacMagic "upsamples" all sources to 24/384. I am wondering whether it is necessary or desirable to "upsample" my 16/44.1 and other file types. After all, no new information can be added to the file, right? In my naive mind "upsampling" such a file would amount to chewing it up into little pieces! I would appreciate it if you could educate me a little bit here. Thanks.

[goldsdad]

Hello everybody […] I am wondering whether it is necessary or desirable to "upsample" my 16/44.1 and other file types. After all, no new information can be added to the file, right? In my naive mind "upsampling" such a file would amount to chewing it up into little pieces! I would appreciate it if you could educate me a little bit here. Thanks.

 

Welcome Tim,

 

Upsampling/oversampling won't add new information, but a 384 kHz sample rate will allow the DAC to employ gentler filtering than is the case with 44.1 kHz. This should result in a reduction of certain types of audible distortion.

[jhwalker]

Welcome Tim,

 

Upsampling/oversampling won't add new information, but a 384 kHz sample rate will allow the DAC to employ gentler filtering than is the case with 44.1 kHz. This should result in a reduction of certain types of audible distortion.

 

Here's where I start getting confused though - I know some (most?) DACs upsample incoming signals to some arbitrary sample rate no matter what. They also apply the filtering you're talking about somewhere along the way (before / after (?)) the data hits the actual chip that does the digital > analog conversion, etc.

 

Seems to me if your DAC is going to purée your data in any case, you should just feed it unaltered data and let it do the upsampling / resampling / digital filtering only once, no?

 

Complicating matters are DACs that supposedly do *not* resample before conversion - in which case, seems like you'd want to do the upsampling before you give them the data if you want to apply any sort of flitering.

 

I can state that my particular DAC (Schiit Bifrost) sounds better *to me* when I feed it native sample rate files without any sort of resampling beforehand - given it doesn't support 176.4, a very few files are resampled at playback, but the rest are unmolested

[goldsdad]

Seems to me if your DAC is going to purée your data in any case, you should just feed it unaltered data and let it do the upsampling / resampling / digital filtering only once, no?

 

Different up-sampling methods in various player software algorithms, the DAC software or hardware, or a combination of places, will result in different samples at the rate being supplied to the stage of conversion to analogue. The individual listener would have to decide their own preference for the resulting sound when any difference is heard.