What happened in the chain? [Answered]

[Kim_Jensen]

When playing this morning, I saw a strange thing had happened with reduction in quality of the sound.

I have the file in Lossless quality on my Mac mini, which is also where my Roon server is.

I was playing on my PC over a small Musical Fidelity DAC on the USB drive. Normally this will give me Lossless playback, but here I got an extra ring in the chain, reducing the sample rate.

[Carl]

Hi Kim,

Musical Fidelity make quite a few DAC’s, which model/version are you using?

Can you check its specification to find out what the highest sample rate it supports over USB?
Looking at the MF site I can see that some of their DAC’s support up to 192kHz, whilst others are only 96kHz.

For example:

@MX-DAC

1x USB type ‘B’ connector - Asynchronous data stream at up to 24-bit/192kHz PCM as well as DSD64 and DSD128

@90-DAC

1x USB type ‘B’ connector - Asynchronous data stream at up to 24-bit/96kHz

[Kim_Jensen]

Hi Carl

Oh yes, I had Roon for a few days only, so this must be the first time I play a 192 kHz song over the laptop with my Musical Fidelity V90-HPA, which is a DAC and head phone amplifier - and that is 24-bit/96 kHz only.

I have played the same music directly from the Mac Mini, but that is connected to my HiFi system - NuPrime DAC9/STA9 and that is another matter.

Thanks for the explation!

[Carl]

Thanks for confirming, hope all is clear now.
Regards,
Carl