24/96 or 24/192

There's a group of folks on http://AudioAsylum.com who have recently discovered the magic of Cary CD players (inlcuding myself!) One of them just traded in her Sony SCD-777ES SACD player for the Cary 303 and she couldn't be happier.

Thanks everybody I went with 303 from upscale audio and I could not be more pleased. The improvement to redbooks is fantastic. Thanks again.

I have the new Cary CD-306/200 (not even shown yet on their website). There is a noticable improvement in most cases when I run it in 24/192 mode. Even in 24/96 mode it blew away my MSB Gold Link III DAC that uses 4 24-bit Burr-Brown DAC chips. The Cary 306/200 includes digital inputs so you can use this player as an external DAC for other equipment. I sometimes run my Adcom 5-disc changer through the Cary's DAC's.

I auditioned the Cary 303 but didn't do an actual A/B against the 306 side-by-side. The 306 may have a slight edge with 24/192 but maybe not worth the price difference unless you wanted the added features decscribed above. I could easily live with the Cary 303. I like both Cary models over some other high-end brands.

Just make sure the two DAC chip are similar in quality. A great 24/96 chip will outperform a poor 24/192 chip, much like a Pentium III processsor runnning at 700 Mhz will run circles around an Intel Celeron runnning at 800 Mhz.

One of my friends with the dcs delius setup did an ramp up test of the scd1(transport)/dcs against his scd-1's analog output. He went from 44 up to 192. Up to 24/96, I would say they were pretty close. Once the dcs got into 128 and 192 territory it was instantly and obviously superior. I've heard this same system with several other dacs, and but I don't think any of them come close to the dcs in 192 upsampling mode. This same friend used to have a levinson 360 and commented that the dcs blew it away. He does tend to say 'blew it away' quite often.

I have heard the levinson 360s in another friends system and thought it was very good, but not dcs/192 good. I loaned this same friend my sony SCD-1. He commented that the sony was almost as good as the levinson 360s for cd playback. I didn't hear them a/b, but I would tend to agree with that. Both of these players were quite a bit better than his Sony 9000 sacd/dvd player. He's got an ultra-res spectral system, so you hear everything down to the last painful detail.

If you're onto listening regular CDs -- there should not be any difference except that extra oversampling will "forgive" most of badly recorded CDs and make them sound nicer than they have to.
If you will get a collection of video format CDs than 24/192 wins.
I've auditioned Cary CD303 with remastered Dire Straits "Love Over Gold" CD and it reminded me my J.A.Michell -- so analogue-like and soft!

When I had a chance to compare 24/96 on a Levinson 360S DAC to 24/192 on a dCS Elgar (using a dCS Purcell for the upsampling with both), I traded in the Levinson for the Elgar. Just to check, I tried the Elgar at 24/96, and there was almost as great a difference comparing the Elgar running at 24/96 to the Elgar at 24/192. The difference between the Levinson and Elgar at 24/96 on both would never have been enough to justify the trade-in.