24/96 or 24/192


Hi everybody I am 90% ready buy a Cary 303 cdp. The only thing holding me back is that it does not have the 24/192 upsampling.A friend of mine feels thier is no real difference and that I should make my choice on other factors. Any thoughts Thanks
stereodad
When I had a chance to compare 24/96 on a Levinson 360S DAC to 24/192 on a dCS Elgar (using a dCS Purcell for the upsampling with both), I traded in the Levinson for the Elgar. Just to check, I tried the Elgar at 24/96, and there was almost as great a difference comparing the Elgar running at 24/96 to the Elgar at 24/192. The difference between the Levinson and Elgar at 24/96 on both would never have been enough to justify the trade-in.
If you're onto listening regular CDs -- there should not be any difference except that extra oversampling will "forgive" most of badly recorded CDs and make them sound nicer than they have to.
If you will get a collection of video format CDs than 24/192 wins.
I've auditioned Cary CD303 with remastered Dire Straits "Love Over Gold" CD and it reminded me my J.A.Michell -- so analogue-like and soft!
One of my friends with the dcs delius setup did an ramp up test of the scd1(transport)/dcs against his scd-1's analog output. He went from 44 up to 192. Up to 24/96, I would say they were pretty close. Once the dcs got into 128 and 192 territory it was instantly and obviously superior. I've heard this same system with several other dacs, and but I don't think any of them come close to the dcs in 192 upsampling mode. This same friend used to have a levinson 360 and commented that the dcs blew it away. He does tend to say 'blew it away' quite often.

I have heard the levinson 360s in another friends system and thought it was very good, but not dcs/192 good. I loaned this same friend my sony SCD-1. He commented that the sony was almost as good as the levinson 360s for cd playback. I didn't hear them a/b, but I would tend to agree with that. Both of these players were quite a bit better than his Sony 9000 sacd/dvd player. He's got an ultra-res spectral system, so you hear everything down to the last painful detail.