24/96 vs 24/192 DAC

DVD-A can be done at 24/192khz

Ive got several DVD-A discs, Metallica Black, BB King Riding with the King, Stone Temple Pilots, Doors La Woman, and a couple others. They all sound sweet, well, the Stone temple pilots sucks...

BB King and Metallica sound incredible, but they are only 24/96. Not all DVD's run with any particular sample rate, some are 24/96, some are 24/192, some sample like redbook.

the ONLY recordings I have that are done in 24/196 are a few of the songs on the DVD-A demo disk.

The difference between the 24/96 and 24/192 is barly audible in my opinion. That coould be a result of lack of material i own in the 24/196 rate, I suppose in time as with any new technology it might pay to go ahead and get one with the 196/24, as with new any hardware it always takes a while for the quality software to start pumpin out.

Worry more about the implementation than whether an audio component has a "specific" technology or not. I would not pass up a 24/96 or even a non-upsampling DAC just because it is not 24/192. Same thing with DAC chips. Who cares whether it uses Burr brown 1704k's or DSD1792's. If it sounds good enough, then that alone should be good enough. It's all about implementation.

One thing I do know...it's a damn confusing mess! I have a "universal" player (Denon 2900) and it, like the previous one, (Pioneer DV45A) knows how to figure out what to do, so I don't really need to know.

For DVD-A 96KHz is all you get for 5.1 multichannel, but if the recording is only stereo, 192KHz is possible. I have the impression that DVD-A, unlike SACD, is a very flexible protocol. The disc producer has a certain amount of data bandwidth to work with, and can allocate it as he chooses.(eg: #channels, sampling rate, coefficients for realtime mixdown to stereo, video, etc.)

The 44.1 KHz sampling rate of regular (redbook) CDs is really cutting it close to the minimum acceptable for 20KHz audio. The oft-quoted Nyquist criteria for signal fidelity(sampling rate should be at least twice the highest frequerncy of interest) applies to sine waves, and we know that music is not a pure sine wave. Increasing the sample rate to 96KHz is a significant improvement. Going higher than that provides little if any improvement. Of course 24 bits can more accurately represent an analog waveform, and/or give greater dynamic range, but the benefit will not be realized in practice unless the analog signal processing is also good.