try a high end dac and you will have different results again...
NPR Audio Quality and Upconversion
NPR posted an article questioning whether listeners can discern the difference in audio formats, and subsequently if services such as Tidal are worth the money.
http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/how-well-can-you-hear-audio-quality
I ran through the six tests and to my chagrin I only got three right, and those three were not confident selections. I checked the settings on my DAC and realized all the tracks were registering as 192khz, and I have up-sampling turned off.
After I upgraded to Windows 10 this weekend for some reason the driver settings changed and the DAC was set in Windows to play at 192, not 44.1 where I normally keep it for browser streaming. After changing it back and trying the test again I got all six correct and the differences between tracks were blatant, it wasn't a challenge to pick out the uncompressed file.
So is this a knock on up-sampling or is there something else going on?
Second question, is there a way to set Windows to dynamically adjust the DAC output setting when streaming via a browser? Running Tidal in Chrome my DAC (Teac UD-501) only sees whatever sample rate is set for the device in Windows. In contrast, it sees whatever type is fed to it via JRiver.
BG
http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/how-well-can-you-hear-audio-quality
I ran through the six tests and to my chagrin I only got three right, and those three were not confident selections. I checked the settings on my DAC and realized all the tracks were registering as 192khz, and I have up-sampling turned off.
After I upgraded to Windows 10 this weekend for some reason the driver settings changed and the DAC was set in Windows to play at 192, not 44.1 where I normally keep it for browser streaming. After changing it back and trying the test again I got all six correct and the differences between tracks were blatant, it wasn't a challenge to pick out the uncompressed file.
So is this a knock on up-sampling or is there something else going on?
Second question, is there a way to set Windows to dynamically adjust the DAC output setting when streaming via a browser? Running Tidal in Chrome my DAC (Teac UD-501) only sees whatever sample rate is set for the device in Windows. In contrast, it sees whatever type is fed to it via JRiver.
BG