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RE: Upsampling

Posted by soundchekk (A) on January 3, 2020 at 00:20:31

In Reply to: Upsampling posted by Dawnrazor on January 2, 2020 at 17:08:03:

It depends.

There are very good reasons for doing upsampling.

But this depends

1. on the DAC you're using.
2. on the external resampler quality

There are numerous DACs out there doing internal upsampling/oversampling.
They pretty much all come with reconstruction filters inside.

Both parts the up-/oversampler and the filter have impact on the sound - positive and negative.

What you need to know is how your DAC is processing the data.
Some use internal DAC chip technology for resampling, some use ASRCs, others FPGAs... And there are also still NOS DACs out there.

Without knowing how your DAC is processing the data you won't be able
to approach the subject properly. Of course you can try and see what
you end up with.

Some DACs do internal resampling to 352k8/384k. There are DACs where the internal resampler gets bypassed at 352k8/384.
In this case you'd IMO have a very good chance to improve the sound by using an external highest quality upsampler. Highest Quality. That's the key of course!

Further @ these high samplerates filters can be configured much less aggressive. This usually translates into much lower filter artifacts.
No filter is lossless, no resampler is lossless. And that's a reason why manufacturers apply these high samplingrates at all.

The DSP jobs inside the DAC are usually (quality) limited. They can't achieve highest quality DSP. That's a typical bottleneck.
With an excellent external tool you might be able to beat the DAC internal DSP/filters, if the DAC allows to bypass its bottlenecks.
On a lot of DACs (e.g. ESS Sabre) it simply makes no sense to feed 384k since they run internally much higher samplerates. And feeding 384k externally would mean more losses by the exteranl resampler and losses
by processing much higher rates in the chain (CPU load etc.) .

It's not that simple.

Good luck.

Edits: 01/03/20

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