2. pc-audio
  3. 1311610673

Oversampling rate in J River

I have a W4S Dac 2 that I am using with my laptop. I am having a ball downloading hi res music and ripping CDs. Sounds great, lots of fun and boy do I love the convenience. Also have solid state Mac and a pair of B&W 803Ss.

I have been fooling around with different DSP settings and have found virtually very little change or change that I care for...Until this weekend when I changed the oversampling from none to 192,000. Wow. Quantum leap. More presence, detail and what many in these forums would call involvement.

What happened? is this normal? PC audio is fairly new to me. Looking for advice/input from those who know.
dmm53

Showing 3 responses by audioengr

audioengr
3,282 posts
 
This is upsampling. Often the D/A chip behaves better with higher sample-rates, particularly when the digital filtering is not adjustable. Digital filtering is one of the things that causes digital audio to be fatigueing, along with jitter. Unfortunately, upsamplers are usually not as good as the real hi-res files, particularly hardware upsamplers like this one.

BTW, There are other ways to make your W4S sound a LOT better without upsampling.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio
audioengr
3,282 posts
 
One thing to understand is that the USB interface, and in particular, the master clocks, is the MOST IMPORTANT thing in a USB digital computer audio system. More important than the DAC itself. More important than the sample-rate that you are playing back.

To prove this to you here are some anecdotes:

http://www.avguide.com/review/musical-fidelity-m1-dac-and-v-link-usb-adapter-tas-213

Latest issue of TAS, Steven Stones review of the iDAC

Steve N.
Empirical Audio
audioengr
3,282 posts
 
Of course what we are talking about here is jitter and all of the contributors to jitter. I have written several white-papers on this:

http://www.positive-feedback.com/Issue43/jitter.htm

http://www.positive-feedback.com/Issue22/nugent.htm

http://www.positive-feedback.com/Issue14/spdif.htm

The point I'm making is that if the master clock is not REALLY GOOD, all other bets are off. It does not matter how careful you are downstream. The damage is already done. And this damage makes all of the fancy technology that you put into the DAC worthless.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio
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