Playing Kent Poon's hi-res material

[Olive Empithrie]

Ok, so I purchased Kent Poon's Audiophile Jazz Prologue III primarily as the music was well reviewed, but also because I wanted to have a play around with the hi-res material, just for a bit of fun really. I've always been a Red Book girl as it's "good enough" for me and I reckon it might be a few more years before a meaningful selection of material is available in hi-res anyway. Still, I admit I'm a little curious as to what the sonic improvements might be into my USB DAC, so...

 

I copied the 24/96 files over to my hard drive, converted them from AIFF to WAV in foorbar2000 cos I wanna keep the playback Native to Windows. Cropped and saved the pdf art file as a JPEG for nice quality cover art, imported everything into JRiver where it updated my library tags etc. just like normal. Right then, sorted! Hit play and...

 

Message saying ASIO4ALL doesn't support 96000 playback resolution. Is this right? Come to think of it, I think it might be, I seem to remember it only supports from 32kHZ to 48kHZ.

 

Any ideas?

 

I'm not a huge fan of media monkey as it crashed quite a lot on both of my machines...

 

Olive

xx

 

[Olive Empithrie]

I'm guessing it's the free ASIO4ALL driver that's the bottleneck here.

 

Any recommendations for ASIO drivers that will allow 24/96? Preferably one that sounds no worse than ASIO4ALL for Red Book playback?

 

OE

 

 

 

 

[PeterSt]

Hi Olive,

 

I don't think alternatives for ASIO4ALL exist. Keep in mind : ASIO4ALL is a bick trick, and allows ASIO for devices actually not supporting it. Or the other way around : ASIO must be supported by the device and the device will be a soundcard, or otherwise your only option is ASIO4ALL.

Btw ASIO is always free afaik.

 

Another thing is : are you sure your DAC supports 24/96 ? (16/96 is more likely for USB !).

 

Peter

 

Edit : not true, there's also this solution (but it is not free) : http://www.usb-audio.com/

 

[andrew1905]

I am currently listening to a 96 KHz 24Bit FLACC file via Media Monkey using ASIO4ALL. It was down loaded from Linn and . I have in the past converted this to WAV at this resolution and all was well.

 

For the record it's Claire Martin's Perfect Alibi

 

Andrew

 

[Olive Empithrie]

Thanks guys,

 

Andrew, that's interesting. I might try media monkey one more time - perhaps it's a JRiver limitation.

 

Peter, DAC will accept up to 24/192 but is a 16bit NOS so will chop off the last 8 bits, i.e., will accept 24/96 but actually play 16/96. I'll check out your link, thanks.

 

I'm still planning to try your XX software as well. Actually I went back to the thread to post a quite startling observation, but by that time the thread had gone off the rails. I will post my findings some other time when things have calmed down as I'd like to understand how the differences I heard (and hubby, who's as DEAF AS A POST but detected correctly every time while blind) are even possible.

 

Olive.

 

 

[PeterSt]

Peter, DAC will accept up to 24/192 but is a 16bit NOS so will chop off the last 8 bits, i.e., will accept 24/96 but actually play 16/96.

 

I wonder whether it will accept the 24/196 over USB. I can't imagine that ...

Well, something to keep in mind anyway. :-)