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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
gdaddy1
517 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"  

soix
11,242 posts
 

What is your DAC?
 

Originally an EVS Milennium DAC1 and now a Musician Pegasus R2R NOS DAC (original version) with a Denafrips Iris DDC running i2S.  In both cases the results were similar and obviously both are far from SOTA DACs so FWIW, but what I heard and related above was consistent and obvious in both cases. 

audphile1's avatar
audphile1
7,944 posts
 

The masters might be different @erik_squires and we just don’t know. Sometimes I can tell that I’ll listening to a hi-res version, at times I think I do only to find that it’s a 16 44. 
My Meitner MA3i DAC converts everything to DSD1024 and it negates the differences. 

erik_squires OP
17,549 posts
 

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. 

Depends what you are doing with it, but sure if you are upsampling and doing parametric EQ then that will take more CPU time.  It does seem to affect the heat generated by a DAC though.  That is, higher sampling rates seem to create more heat and sometimes more stability issues.  Another reason I avoid anything higher than 192k.  

erik_squires OP
17,549 posts
 

This is very true!! I think this happens less with most recordings being digital first, but when they used to make CD's from analog masters, each pressing could be digitally remastered.  This would explain for instance, DSOTM sounding so different depending on the pressing, despite all being digital. 

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