I have been experimenting with the sampling rates in the MIDI setup on my Macbook and found that switching between 44.1 and 48khz has a major effect on the sound, much more than I remembered from my previous Mac Mini/DAC combo. I am running it into a PS Audio DAC Link 3 and changing the output sampling rate on my laptop has a bigger impact on sound than switching between 96khz and 192khz upsampling.
Switching to 48khz creates a very open and diffuse sound while still offering a very solid center image and lots of top-end sparkle. 44.1khz sounds warmer and has a bit more body, but also seems restricted dynamically and also a much less immense sound field.
I have also used a Benchmark DAC in my system and found that even going to 24/96 output which it would accept did less to effect the sound than switching to 48khz with the DAC Link 3. Anyone else have similar experiences with this? I have my own ideas why this may be (48khz is integer of upsampling frequencies, some recordings show up in iTunes as 48khz sampling, etc.) but maybe someone else can share their insight.
