Foxx…you can’t help getting old but don’t get fed up here.
If you look at your iTunes output settings or the general audio settings on your Mac, then I think you will see that it is set for 192/24.
This means that whatever file you play it will be number-crunched up to that solution. If you tried a BIt Perfect solution and saw 44/16 files getting out at 192/24 then it was configured quite right.
Bit Perfect means that what gets to the DAC should be EXACTLY what was in the file. So, if the file is 44/16, then that is what the DAC gets.
Your PS DAC is a really fine unit and I would leave it to do ALL the processing on the files just as they are on your MAC. This is what Roon is actually doing right now.
With iTunes don’t be fooled that 192/24 output is better. Nit will not be.
Just a final thought…your files are AAC. This is lossy. Not the best format tbh. I wonder if you ripped them at 192 AAC in iTunes. This is quite a significant lossy compression setting. Just checking but you could confuse this with hi-res 192/24 files. The file you showed earlier certainly is not a hi-res file.
Check file/properties in an album folder and post what you see. That hopefully help you grasp what is happening here.
Your nice PS DAC is showing exactly what it should show as-is Roon.
Have looked at Mac Pro settings and have found something surprising, it will no longer stay in 24/192 in the midi settings, when an album finishes it drops out to 44/16.
Also have found out that my files are now indeed lossy rubbish, plus I think I know how this happened; last year I bought a LaCie thunder bolt two 8 tb drive which was faulty, this was changed back to a western digital 8tb thunderbolt one, they also transferred everything from the LaCie to the western digital.
At this time I was using the ps audio perfect wave dac which you could set at 24/192 so far so good. I’ve only just rebuilt and changed boards power supply etc to the DSD dac a few weeks ago, and this time it plays by files meaning you can’t set it to 24/192 or DSD.
Ok now how do I completely dump iTunes and upsample my music files? I’ve been a hifi high end retailer for many years, but sometimes I find this new fascinating way of music replay confusing, please any help on this would help.
Feeling dam old and confused.
Foxx
PS love the Homer replicas sleeve.
[quote=“Foxx_Artizan_Delaney, post:43, topic:3365”]
how do I completely dump iTunes and upsample my music files?
[/quote]Do you still have lossless versions somewhere? If not you will need to re-rip the music from the original CD’s.
I’m pretty old too, so I’ll step through the resolution thing the way I understand it. It may involve telling you some things you already know, but at the end I hope you’ll be able to see what your options are.
As you know the resolution (44.1, 48, 192 kHz etc) of a digital source is the number of samples per second; how finely the music is sliced into numbers. When a digital music file is created it will have a ‘native resolution’ reflecting the sampling rate used to create it. CD resolution is 44.1 kHz and files ripped from CDs will have that native resolution. You can also these days buy higher resolution digital downloads from sites such as http://www.hdtracks.com/ .
Sometimes, in order to save storage space, people reduce the size of digital music files by using compression algorithms. These can be “lossy” meaning some numbers are left out, or “lossless” meaning no numbers are left out. AAC is a lossy format, FLAC can be lossless. You can convert from one format to another, but you can’t put back what has been left out in the past. You can’t make a lossy file lossless.
In addition to the above, it is possible to upsample or downsample a digital source file and change its resolution. You can do that either in playback, or (depending on your software) save the result as a new file. Down sampling might be used to play a hi res file on a DAC that can’t play hi res files. Up sampling can have audio benefits enabling noise to be pushed into much higher inaudible frequencies so that less aggressive filters can be used. This can avoid problems arising from relatively aggressive filtering.
What up sampling cannot do, however, is create new numbers. It has to guess what numbers should be used for the new slices. An upsampled file won’t have the same information in it as a file with native hi resolution.
The bad news is that if you want to listen to hi res files, as distinct from up sampling lossy AAC 44.1 kHz files, then you will need new files.
The good news is you may not yet have heard what your system is capable of. I’d suggest downloading a native hi res file and seeing how it sounds on your system through Roon. I hope you go “wow” !
