I don’t consider myself an audiophile, being deaf on one side eliminates that, but I did spend money on multi-channel equipment because I like the music coming from all around me. The multi-channel DSD capable Dac I have does play DSD 512 2 channel and DSD 256 8 channel and I have purchased some music files up to the max it can handle.
FYI, I did try the DSD 512 file with the HDMI zone that can play PCM Multi-channel up to 192/24 PCM.
The processing speed was 3.4x and it played fine all the way through.
But as someone pointed out it could take more CPU power to down sample DSD to DSD. I don’t know. In my case the DSD512 was converted twice, DSD to PCM then PCM to 192/24.
If I tried that with DSD 256 5.1 the processing speed is 1x, it plays for a while then started skipping and quits.
There is a very straight answer to this rhetorical question: Because I am getting a DAC that plays DSD512 natively within a month; and because PS Audio makes DSD512 available for their DSD256 files, with Paul McGowan saying DSD512 sounds best if you can play it natively. I remember days when one could play only red book CD on most hardware - in retrospect, it was a good thing to get the highest resolution material as soon as it was available, to play for 10, 20, … years on
My SSD is Seagate 870 QVO SATA III 2.5" SSD 8TB (MZ-77Q8T0B), purchased in 12/2020, from Amazon, for $840. I used it in Nucleus+ before I upgraded to Titan, but never tried it with DSD512 before.
I should also say that my library on the internal SSD was transferred from Nucleus+ to Titan, per Roon instructions (the SSD was not reformatted).
I did notice that when I dismounted the Titan’s internal SSD from my Mac laptop (from which the DSD512 files were copied to Titan), it took about 30 seconds instead of 10 seconds for playing to stop, as if slightly less load from not having to worry about the remote SSD mount did indeed extend the valiant Titan’s effort to play DSD512 files. These 10 and 30 second playbacks until failure were pretty reproducible in duration, including for different DSD512 tracks.
Sounds like something may be bad hardware wise. I’d be surprised if the Titan can’t deal with this if 6-7 year old hardware can. I guess wait for support to check in maybe tomorrow.
