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iTunes and MF V-DACII sampling questions


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Hello everyone at the forum,

 

I am new at the forum and am kindly asking for your help (no problems actually, everything is working, I would just like to understand better how stuff works):

 

Digital part of my music system consists of iMac and Musical Fidelity V-DACII connected via USB cable. My entire music collection is in 16/44,1 format. I play music through iTunes. My Audio MIDI Setup for V-DACII shows "44,100 KHz, 2ch-24Bits" (bits are locked but I can change sample rate). V-DACII is upsampling DAC, which means that every signal is converted to 24/192.

 

My questions for here described setup are:

1. Does iTunes or CoreAudio upsample my 16/44,1 music files to 24/44,1 as Audio MIDI Setup shows?

2. In which format (bits/samplerate) is the audio being sent to V-DACII?

3. What is better solution: to use "44.100" or "96.000" setting in Audio Midi Setup since either will be converted to 192.000 in DAC? In first case, the sample rate of the original file is preserved until it reaches DAC.

4. Audio MIDI Setup says that Clock is "default". I know that USB on V-DAC is asynchronous but which clock is then used in the audio stream?

 

I am a bit confused about this. Thank you for reading my first post and for kind support.

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Just to bump this topic, I would like to narrow down my issue and my question:

 

as things stand now, two SRCs are happening in my digital chain: first the OS audio converts 16/44 to 24/44 and then the DAC upsamples 24/44 to 24/192. Audio MIDI setup gives no option for sending 16-bit audio, it is locked on 24 bits. Is there a way to trick the OS X to send the original 16/44 samples to DAC?

Thank you again.

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16 to 24 bit conversion is not upsampling per se, as no new samples are generated. Only the 16 bit values are "padded" to make them look like 24 bits, and shouldn't have any audible impact at least to my limited understanding.

 

If you want to experiment with upsampling, I'd go for an external player, as the build in ITunes sample rate converter (SRC) apparently is not the best. The cheapest choice is Bitperfect from the App Store, which I already uses more sophisticated SRC, but I'd strongly recommend checking out Audirvana plus, which uses Izotope, one of the best SRC routines, or alternatively Fidelia.

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