Need a Little Help Understanding the 24 bit setup for Winamp and a external USB Dac...

[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