[adydula]

Hello...been on the fence for years from digitized music....do to well being lazy, a creature of habit and just liking to put the cd in the player and listen...

So I digitized all my cds to flac, mostly 44.1khz, 16 bit, the standard stuff...and using Winmap to play...

Some of my cds are at a greater bit depth but still at a 44.1khz sampling rate.

I have also downloaded the sample HD Tracks 96/24 album.

So.....in the past I was using Asset™ UPnP (DLNA compatible) from a laptop via ethernet cable to my Oppo BD83SE. I used my 58" plasma screen with the HDMI out from the laptop to see the Oppo menu from across the room. Had to have tons of stuff running to get this all to play, ie..the AVR, the TV, the Oppo, the preamp, the amp etc....but it works and sounds good.


I always wondered how good or better sounding on a decent system would the higher res material really sound. So I discovered that HRT Technologies makes a $150 asynchronous USB dac and with it I could also cut down on the number of appliances being on!!

So $150 later and a few cables its up and running.

Now for the questions:

1. The setup for the HRT Music Streamer ii are fairly easy to perform...you go into the palyback settings for WIN7 and setup all the stuff according to their PDF file. The setting that it recomended is 44.1khz/24bit. Seeing how I have mostly 44.1/16 bit this makes sense to me. When I play the 96/24 flac files I go into the playback settings and change the setting to 96/24..the light on the dac changes accordingly... The question is in Winamp there is a 24 bit setting buried in the preferences.....should this be on or off?
It is off by default. When you select it Winamp tells you that this is for soundcards that can handle 24 bits etc...so seeing how I am sending data from flac files to the usb dac, is this enough with the WIN 7 playback settings set to 96/24 or does this setting in Winamp need to be on as well??

Hope this was clear enough to undersand what i am trying to understand..

All the best
Alex

[wilsynet]

Turn it on in the player as well.  Having said that, I seem to recall that WinAmp goes through the Windows Mixer.

You may want to try some of the players mentioned in this post:

http://www.computeraudiophile.com/content/Foobar-MediaMonkeyCplayJ-River-Ulilith-PotPlayer-XXHE-What-Journey

[adydula]

Thanks for the reply.

My main concern is to get the ripped flacs to the dac with 100% accuracy. If the Flacs are indeed have all the information the original cd had then i just want to to go back out the same..

With my transcoding my flacs back to what is on a cd via ethernet and DLNA is great.

I just want to make sure that nothing in the player impedes the data, truncates or makes the flac playback to the usd dac anything less.

I will try the 24 bit setting in WinAmp and listen with it on and off with my 96/24 bit flac files and report back.

Thanks
Alex

[wilsynet]

The reason why you want to use something other than WinAmp is for the same reason that not all CD players are created equal.  The better the media player, the better the output to the DAC.  It's not strictly a 0s and 1s thing, there's jitter to consider as the data is converted to a format suitable for the DAC.  Because you're using an async DAC, it should matter less, but it may still matter some.

Having said that, even if you stick to WinAmp, you'll still want to make sure Windows itself is configured well.  The Wavelength site has a good article on configuring Windows for best playback.  Although it talks about their DACs, you can just as easily apply the same advice to your own system.

http://usbdacs.com/Windows/Windows.html

[valtopps]

the hrt music stream is an excellent choise. i bought one i got the II+ huge improvement from my hifiman dac. so i can imagine the sound from a laptop to a hrt.

[wtaylorbasil]

Some of my cds are at a greater bit depth but still at a 44.1khz sampling rate.
I

[/b]

I have read elsewhere that that all CDs (not SACD & DVD-A) are Redbook Specification and recorded at 44.1KHz/16Bit. Even though some CD materials are taken from 20/96 or 24/192 resolution, the resolution recorded on the CD will always be 44.1/16.
Can anyone with technical knowledge comment on this.
William 

[wilsynet]

I have read elsewhere that that all CDs (not SACD & DVD-A) are Redbook Specification and recorded at 44.1KHz/16Bit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Book_(CD_standard)

As far as I know, to name something an Audio CD necessarily means that it follows the Red Book standard, and the Red Book standard spells out 44.1/16.

If something is written to CD media and does not conform to this standard, then it cannot be called an "Audio CD".

That is not to say that you cannot, for example, put high resolution music files on a CD-ROM, but that's not Red Book.  And your CD player may or may not be able to read it.

I do sometimes see "24 bit masters" or something like that on an audio CD.  This just means that the masters were 24 bit, not that the content written to the audio CD is actually 24 bit.

[Vincent Kars]

If you have a 24 bit DAC set the entire audio path (media player and Win) to 24 bits.
If you don’t any 24 bit recording will be truncated to 16 and probably dithered.
If you do, a 16 bit recording will be padded with 8 zero bits having zero impact on sound quality.

The sample rate you set in the Win audio panel will be the value used for all recordings.
As a consequence all audio with a different sample rate will be resampled.

A better way is to use automatic sample rate switching.
This requires a media player supporting the WASAPI interface.
Players like J River media center or MusicBee supports this interface.

[django11]

I have been trying, without any luck, to get wasapi to work with the hrt 2, Foobar and Win7.  I have however been listening for a while with the device set to 24/96 and it sounds wonderful...

[srb]

I have been trying, without any luck, to get wasapi to work with the hrt 2, Foobar and Win7.  I have however been listening for a while with the device set to 24/96 and it sounds wonderful...

So, I assume you have
 
1. Downloaded foo_out_wasapi.zip from http://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_out_wasapi and extracted foo_out_wasapi.dll into foobar's \components folder
 
2. Selected the WASAPI driver within foobar from File > Preferences > Playback > Output, and under the Output Device dropdown, selected WASAPI: HRT Music Streamer USB (or whatever the HRT USB device is referred to) and the Output Data Format dropdown set to 24-bit
 
If you have gotten that far, what kind of error do you get when you try to playback different resolution files?
 
Steve