MacBook Air, Dragonfly Red, and higher bit rates?

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jrebman

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MacBook Air, Dragonfly Red, and higher bit rates?
« on: 6 Sep 2017, 01:41 pm »
I want to use a dragonfly red plugged directly into my MBA, which will then feed an outboard headphone amp (tube), but wonder what will happen if a PCM file of over the DFR's max rate of 24/96 is sent to it? I really would like to not have my ears blown off if the DFR flips out at the higher bit rate file. I'd be playing files from a random playlist and would have no control over individual files and I don't want to resample my whole library to 24/96 or lower.

Thanks for any help,

Jim

P.S. -- playback software will probably be either audirvana or similar.

mikeeastman

Re: MacBook Air, Dragonfly Red, and higher bit rates?
« Reply #1 on: 6 Sep 2017, 03:37 pm »
I'm not familiar with audirvana but most playback software I've used has a way to set sampling rate and you can have all files set to sample at 24/96 and that should work.

jrebman

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Re: MacBook Air, Dragonfly Red, and higher bit rates?
« Reply #2 on: 6 Sep 2017, 04:20 pm »
Ok, I'm pretty sure that's the case. I guess I should have asked what happens if I don't have that capability -- like playing back streaming from a NAS to something like a micro rendu.

As I said, I just don't want to blow up my ears, or speakers if I use it in a room system.

I may just have to find another small, portable DAC that can do 24/192.

Thanks,

Jim

jhm731

Re: MacBook Air, Dragonfly Red, and higher bit rates?
« Reply #3 on: 6 Sep 2017, 05:41 pm »
You can set the sample rate in the MBA's Audio MIDI Setup in the Utilities folder.

jrebman

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Re: MacBook Air, Dragonfly Red, and higher bit rates?
« Reply #4 on: 6 Sep 2017, 06:20 pm »
Ok, but again, what if I'm using a source such as a micro rendu streaming from a DLNA NAS that doesn't have a max sample rate setting and from wich, while playing random files, a file with sample rate higher than 96k goes out on the network? Or, is there a way to set max sample rate on the micro rendu?

The network is not in place yet -- NAS will be here next week -- so I can't just go and test this. If I could, I would not have to asked here. Perhaps there is a better place to ask this question?

Thanks much,

Jim

jrebman

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Re: MacBook Air, Dragonfly Red, and higher bit rates?
« Reply #5 on: 6 Sep 2017, 06:32 pm »
Ok, instead of wasting folks' time here, I wrote to AQ tech support. If it won't work then I'll just sell the DFR and get another small DAC.

Thanks,

Jim

jhm731

Re: MacBook Air, Dragonfly Red, and higher bit rates?
« Reply #6 on: 6 Sep 2017, 08:23 pm »
I just talked to AQ tech support.

If you feed the DragonFly a signal above 24/96, it will downsample the signal.

It will not blow your ears off.


jrebman

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Re: MacBook Air, Dragonfly Red, and higher bit rates?
« Reply #7 on: 6 Sep 2017, 08:47 pm »
Thank you very much!

I wonder why they didn't respond to my email query?

Really helpful -- thanks again!

-- Jim

jrebman

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Re: MacBook Air, Dragonfly Red, and higher bit rates?
« Reply #8 on: 11 Sep 2017, 07:26 pm »
JHM731,

Thanks again -- still no response, or even an acknowledgement on the part of AQ tech support.

iI guess the lesson is that if you want tech support from AQ, you have to give them a phone call.

Thanks again,

Jim