Hate to burst your bubble, but you're not listening to "DVDs" at all. There's a separate 16/44.1 recording on each DVD disk, and that's what's being sent to your DAC. In all likelihood, this is exactly the same thing you'd find on a CD of the same recording. If you want to hear something better than 16/44.1, you've got to bypass the DAC and hook the analog outs of the DVD player directly into your preamp.
Naive question about digital encoding
I have what it likely a very naive question about the digital input to my DAC, but its puzzled me for a while and I'd like to understand what's happening.
I have an older DAC that I have connected to my DVD player which acts as a transport. Regardless of whether I play CD's or DVD's, the whole thing works and the system sounds fine. The DAC is designed to accept a 16 bit/44 khz signal, and I assume that the DVD audio is encoded at 24/96. What's happening with the DAC when I play DVD audio through it? I would expect to hear nothing intelligible since the formats presumably aren't the same, but this doesn't seem to be the case. Can anyone explain what's being output by the DVD player in both cases, and how the DAC is able to interpret both types of input?
Thanks, Ken
I have an older DAC that I have connected to my DVD player which acts as a transport. Regardless of whether I play CD's or DVD's, the whole thing works and the system sounds fine. The DAC is designed to accept a 16 bit/44 khz signal, and I assume that the DVD audio is encoded at 24/96. What's happening with the DAC when I play DVD audio through it? I would expect to hear nothing intelligible since the formats presumably aren't the same, but this doesn't seem to be the case. Can anyone explain what's being output by the DVD player in both cases, and how the DAC is able to interpret both types of input?
Thanks, Ken