Oversampling rate in J River

Steve,

"There are other ways to make your W4S sound a LOT better without upsampling."

Pray, tell . . .

Thanks,
--Neil

Ekwisnek:

I used the settings published by W4S for the DAC for J River. I am using Media center 16 and had it set on no oversampling. I am using Kernel Streaming, as recommended by W4S. I had no other DSP settings in use.

of course, I have the W4S driver selected in the setup which I thought bypassed all the sound drivers in Windows Vista. Have I missed something?

Audioengr:

If there are ways with my current setup to improve the sound, I am all ears and would be very appreciative. If it requires me buying an Off Ramp,then not so much.

Luckily Steve is always forthcoming about being in the business, and of course he'll tell you that his product will help; how else would he stay in busniess?

I read through W4S's J River setup guide and they hit all the important spots. Your setup is solid, and I'm sure you'll get plenty of enjoyment from the DAC as-is. More to Steve's point: sometimes the "all-in-one" solution isn't the best. For PC audio this becomes especially true, given everything that happens from the moment you press Play on the file, to the moment it reaches the analog outputs of your DAC. I cuurently use a modified M2Tech Hiface that runs "off-grid" on battery power. You would not believe the improvements this made in my system. To each their own, and I'm never one to push people to buy more gear; I'm just telling you my findings.

Just remember: You can NEVER recreate the music that has been destroyed during the recording, downconversion, or complression process. You may hear a "difference" when upsampling, but you're not really improving the source material.

Since your hapiness is really all that should be important, I say upsample away, you're not hurting anything.

Thanks. No knock on Steve's product. I'm sure it has added value.

Thanks to everyone. Will continue the journey.

One thing to understand is that the USB interface, and in particular, the master clocks, is the MOST IMPORTANT thing in a USB digital computer audio system. More important than the DAC itself. More important than the sample-rate that you are playing back.

To prove this to you here are some anecdotes:

http://www.avguide.com/review/musical-fidelity-m1-dac-and-v-link-usb-adapter-tas-213

Latest issue of TAS, Steven Stones review of the iDAC

Steve N.
Empirical Audio