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Can you hear bit rate?

Almost all the music I listen to these days is from Roon and often a "station" created from an artist I like.  So I click on say Melody Gardot and Roon start randomly picking similar jazz music.  All great.

As Roon finds new tracks I get stuff rom Qobuz or Tidal and in a variety of bit rates.  from 44.1/16 to I think 96kHz/24.  Sometimes I think "wow that sounds great" and the source material is high res, other times it is not.  

I've typed here for a while that around the turn of the century DAC's have gotten much better at paying Redbook (44.1/16) music than before, so that the difference in sound quality is almost gone.  In addition I use Roon to upsample everything to 176 or 192 kHz.  

I'm finding the question of source depth, at least with PCM, kind of irrelevant these days.   What do you think? 

 

erik_squires
erik_squires OP
17,551 posts
 

So this is a philosophical thing.  When we can hear a difference between 16 and 24 bits, is it really a good DAC or a bad DAC? 

In other words, is it that the DAC is inadequate with 16 bit recordings?  Would a better DAC play 16 bit recordings as well as 24? 

gdaddy1
519 posts
 

It's more than just resolution. I've heard 16 / 44 sound great and there's 24/192 that can sound worse. It seems that how the original was recorded and mastered is FAR more important than the broadcast resolution. 

BTW... Be careful up-sampling in Roon or Audirvana. Pushing the envelope can many times make things worse. 

 

erik_squires OP
17,551 posts
 

@gdaddy1 - For sure I’ve found that DAC’s can’t handle the highest (384k) rates smoothly every time and have had issues with that, so I’m limiting upsampling to 4x which seems to be OK.

As is known, upsampling can cause clipping, so I do reduce the overall signal gain a little.  Roon converts everything to 64 bits before this so I can do this without further loss. 

tksteingraber's avatar
tksteingraber
785 posts
 

Agree with @gdaddy1  My experience using Roon with my Mojo Mystique non-oversampling DAC is it is all about the recording not necessarily the bit rate.  On better systems than mine maybe it is different?

gdaddy1
519 posts
 

@erik_squires   I also noticed that the higher the sample rate the more processing power is required. By a fair amount. Supposedly this creates more noise. To be honest, I couldn't hear any benifit of up-sampling so I just backed away from it. 

One other point that stuck with me was one from Paul McGowen. He said in order to get the most out of high res DSD the original recording MUST be done using DSD throughout. To take a standard resolution and then up-sample to DSD would not yield a better result.

Reminds me of the old adage..."You can't polish a turd"  

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