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?
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
DSD is a very weird duck. Because of the way digitization happens it was very hard for instance to apply digital EQ to the recording afterwards. This made a lot of things difficult to try to keep clean. PCM however lends itself to EQ very nicely, allowing you to EQ track by track. If you had DSD and wanted to EQ it, you'd have to either convert to PCM, or convert to analog, EQ, and then return to DSD, not really a very good process overall for purity. BTW, (unpaid plug for friends) have you guys checked out Blue Coast Records? |
