Okay so the past few days I've been casually browsing various audio forums in part trying to wet my lips on more Senn HD800 info but also Xonar info and i cam across a few posts relating to the best usage of the sample rate settings.
Now, we know that there are 2 places you can set the sample rate conversion to be output, in the Advanced tab of the Speakers properties dialogue and of course in the soundcard's own control panel which tells the card's onboard processors to use "x" sampling rate.
The former is software driven so if you set it to 96000Hz then all sounds will be upsampled by Windows to that rate then sent to the soundcard which will again do some conversion.
Now the discussion was that because the sampling rate converters on the soundcard are of much higher quality than the obvious software ones built into Windows Vista and 7 (XP need not apply because it does not operate at such a high level) that it would be logical and best practice to just leave the Windows sampling rate output to 24bit 44100Hz (the default being 16bit 44100Hz) and then set the soundcard's control panel output to a higher sampling rate such as 96000Hz (96KHz).
Does anyone else follow this train of thought? it makes sense, you'd want the samplling rate to be upconverted at a hardware level if you've got something like an XFi or a Xonar and they say setting the sampling rate to 96KHz in Windows could cause jitter and/or quality loss in extreme cases.
This may explain why in some (not all) movies with AC3 or DTS audio I sometimes heard some crackling on low vocal tones (observed using a variety of decoder filters so not a codec issue) and since setting Windows sampling rate to 24bit 44100Hz and keeping the Xonar CPL to 96KHz as usual has resulted in no such crackles on the same media.
Anyone wish to share their thoughts on this?
Now, we know that there are 2 places you can set the sample rate conversion to be output, in the Advanced tab of the Speakers properties dialogue and of course in the soundcard's own control panel which tells the card's onboard processors to use "x" sampling rate.
The former is software driven so if you set it to 96000Hz then all sounds will be upsampled by Windows to that rate then sent to the soundcard which will again do some conversion.
Now the discussion was that because the sampling rate converters on the soundcard are of much higher quality than the obvious software ones built into Windows Vista and 7 (XP need not apply because it does not operate at such a high level) that it would be logical and best practice to just leave the Windows sampling rate output to 24bit 44100Hz (the default being 16bit 44100Hz) and then set the soundcard's control panel output to a higher sampling rate such as 96000Hz (96KHz).
Does anyone else follow this train of thought? it makes sense, you'd want the samplling rate to be upconverted at a hardware level if you've got something like an XFi or a Xonar and they say setting the sampling rate to 96KHz in Windows could cause jitter and/or quality loss in extreme cases.
This may explain why in some (not all) movies with AC3 or DTS audio I sometimes heard some crackling on low vocal tones (observed using a variety of decoder filters so not a codec issue) and since setting Windows sampling rate to 24bit 44100Hz and keeping the Xonar CPL to 96KHz as usual has resulted in no such crackles on the same media.
Anyone wish to share their thoughts on this?
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