Streaming resolution

@seymour-krelborn 

My understanding is that as the sampling rate goes up, the less steep (less harsh) the filtering needs to be, to avoid aliasing.

yes that is understanding that leads to the whole the idea of oversampling the digital signal prior to conversion

Hardly anybody has mentioned Direct Stream Digital (DSD) which as a minimum samples 64 times more frequently than CD, at about 2.8-MHz.  It requires the gentlest of low pass filters to get rid of MHz noise.

My Reavon universal disk player (closely related to the Oppos but with different dacs) converted DSD to CD quality when using its internal dacs.  The sound quality was so bad, I thought there was a fault but it was a poor design using Burr-Brown dacs that could not natively process DSD.

@richardbrand 

goid to know.  Do you have any experience with Magnetar players?

@mahler123 

Do you have any experience with Magnetar players?

No, but they are very similar to the Reavon - same system-on-a-chip, etc.

I always recommend finding out what dacs are used, and looking up the spec sheets for each type of dac.  If DSD is not explicitly mentioned, steer clear.

My Reavon works brilliantly as a transport, where DSD is output over HDMI to my Marantz AV8800 pre-processor.  This has eight 2-channel dacs from AKM which do natively process DSD.

@seymour-krelborn hits a lot of nails on the head.  The quality of the recording is paramount.  I have a decidedly mid-fi system.  When I started streaming, anything above 44.1/24 sounded muddy or worse.  I'm a bit of novice, and between the forums here, a little AI and a couple of concerned friends with monster systems I was able to clean up the signal and the EMI.  What I found was that working hard to clean up the signal get rid of the extraneous noise was a monumental leap with each step.  I'll spare you the gory details that I may have blurted out in another forum, but I'm at a point where everything I stream, provided the recording is half-decent, sounds fabulous.