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Computer Audio Asylum Music servers and other computer based digital audio technologies. |
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Computer Audio Asylum Music servers and other computer based digital audio technologies. |
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In Reply to: So given the above: Teresa, are you saying... posted by tcell on February 11, 2009 at 04:49:08:
It is hard to tell with computer audio what is going on. This is a basic characteristic of computer software. A huge rats nest of connections can be programmed up and it will look exactly the same as a neatly organized structure to any user who doesn't have the tools and expertise to "look behind the curtain." With hardware things are a little more obvious, because you will likely see the rat's nest of wires or the neat wiring harness without needing any special tools (other than possibly a screw driver). (This is becoming less true as more and more components get shrunk into portions of a chip and the wires require microscopes and milling machines to be seen.)
If you want to know what is going on (For example, does a playback chain really run at 192 kHz?) you can do conduct a black box test. For example, you can play a test file with a sweep tone that goes from 20 to 96 K Hz and connect a scope to the DAC output and see what happens. If you don't have a scope, you can connect another computer with a 192 kHz sound card and use that computer with appropriate software as a scope
Don't trust anyone who claims that a system does or doesn't run at a certain rate, unless you know that (a) he has done these kind of tests and (b) your system is configured the same way his system. Good luck! Caveat Emptor!
In the case of the Mahler 6th symphony, I know that my DAC doesn't run above 96 kHz. When I try to play the 192 kHz files with Sound Forge I get an error message. However, I can play them with cPlay, because cPlay automatically downsamples the files to 96 kHz. As it happens, the 192 kHz files sound a little better than the 96 kHz files. Perhaps this is just a $3 placebo. Perhaps not. Consider that the 96 files were made by down converting from 192 in the production process. So when I did a comparison, what I was really comparing was different filters used in downsampling. It is well known that different digital filters can sound different.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
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Follow Ups
- RE: So given the above: Teresa, are you saying... - Tony Lauck 02/11/0909:23:02 02/11/09 (0)
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