RAVENNA The new benchmark in consumer digital audio systems

[MiveraAudio (Mike Davis [ Banned ])]

It’s not really a limitation. 512 is the real limitation. The reason why is you require much higher jitter clocks to support DSD 512 than DSD 256. Not only that all of the processing power required to upsample to 512. Since there’s no 512 native material available. I explained this in a few posts on another thread:

DSP Up-Sampling features in Roon 1.3

Wow DSD 1024. To support that would require very high jitter clocks. What most people don’t realize is the higher you go up in frequency, the higher the phase noise of the clocks. It’s not just a simple matter of higher is better. It doesn’t take more expense or knowledge to support DSD 1024. DAC manufacturers just don’t do it because they know the compromises involved. So if you see something with that high of support, keep in mind they only did it for marketing purposes, not for better sound. …

Try swapping the clock in your IFI to a much lower jitter 22.579Mhz unit, and reprogramming the Xmos USB interface for it. Then let me know if upsampling 256 sounds better (using much less CPU power) than 512 does now.

DSD 1024 over the Zman could easily be possible. But the Swiss aren’t cavemen with the “bigger hammer can get a better job done” mentality. And they aren’t purely driven by exploiting the ignorance of the average audiophile. They genuinely want better sound.