My system consists of a Nucleus Titan, Denon AVR-110 Anniversary edition, and a Bluesound Node X. This setup is simple and all my music is being sampled properly up to 192khz/24bits which is more than sufficient for the type of music I play.
After reading about the Denon AVR-110 I realized the DAC included in his hardware is quite powerful and therefore I really should not need the Bluesound DAC except if I wanted to play the now defunct MQA format.
So I removed my Bluesound node from the mix and now I have just my Nucleus and Denon in my setup. Much to my surprise all my music started downsampling from higher formats down to 44.1khz or 48khz 16bit. What is happening here? I properly identified my Denon in the setup and don’t see any other settings so why the downsampling?
I would love to start using my Denon DAC but don’t see how this can be done. Does anyone have any experience with my situation and if so what am I doing wrong?
So I have more info on this. If I hit play on a 192/24bit song Roon appears to randomly play it at 192/24bit or 16bit. I will take a screenshot but at the moment it is playing correctly at 192/24bit. I can’t figure out what is causing Roon to downsample.
Just a question for my info, I assume there is not 2/way communication between DAC and Roon so how does Roon determine the appropriate sampling. By source only? If so I am perplexed at why this is not playing music consistently every time.
I am connected via HDMI from the Nucleus Titan to the Denon receiver. HDMI is the only output from the Nucleus.
So am i thinking about this correctly that I should keep it simple and use the Denon DAC. The AVR-A110 is the highest end receiver they sell so I assumed the DAC was inline with quality as well. The original reason I bought the Bluesound was for MQA and we know how that goes.
I am aware DACs have a personal preference component so just looking for any science behind what makes a quality DAC.
Is it possible you have both the Airplay (Roon Tested) audio device and the HDMI feed turned on and that you are just selecting the Airplay one sometimes inadvertently since the names are similar (Denon…)? This might explain the downsampling sometimes. I own the AVR-A1H and have experienced a similar confusion when driving via HDMI.
/DISCLAIMER
Everyone please bear in mind, that I’m commenting in the hope to not spawn yet another objective vs subjective debate, and since you asked for the science behind.
DISCLAIMER/
Since most electronic deficiencies of the distant audiophile past are a solved problem in regard to audibility thresholds these days, one should rather obsess with speakers, room acoustics and DSP to ameliorate their orders of magnitude larger contributions to what you experience.
All the above said, speakers would be my candidate for this sort of description.
TLDR
If you are using any of the AVR‘s features, it‘ll re-digitize your other DAC‘s analog output, muting much of the hoped for improvements anyway.
If using a direct throughput mode to not do multiple DA/AD conversions, then why would you use an AVR to begin with?
I am starting to think there is a small bug here. The Nucleus+ has two outputs - HDMI A and HDMI B. When I attempt to play music using each output enabled I get different results, one of high quality and the other is lossless but I am playing the same exact song each time. Any thoughts on why this may be happening?
You apparently have two Zones/Endpoints set up; is it possible that you have DSP (Muse) enabled for one of them? Or do the two device setups differ in the Advanced settings?
E.g. you have 48kHz set as the max sample rate in one of them:
