2015-07-18, 01:39
(2015-07-17, 00:43)Ceremony Wrote: Is the stock menu required, for this to work properly? As I get stuttering of the menu after i start and stop a few movies...
@meles,
I am not as into this topic as it may have sounded like, but lets just recap everything. First of all, I recommend watching these videos by the awesome folks at xiph.org first, as I will not explain why things are the way things are:
https://xiph.org/video/vid1.shtml and https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml
The human ear can hear up to 20kHz with very few exceptions. If you want to store 20kHz of analogue audio digitally without any loss, you need to at least double the sampling rate, thus 40kHz or more (Nyquist Theorem). Both CD audio (44.1kHz) and DVD/Bluray audio (48kHz) do cover the full range of the human ear, plus some extra. Most speakers and headphones are only capable of reproducing that range (~20Hz-22kHz). Now if you set up your audio card to output 96kHz and actually send analogue audio above 22kHz, you will actually hear something, as the speakers will vibrate at an unintended lower and hearable frequency. Now if you had some of those pointless fidelity 96kHz and above songs, and will listen to them on those speakers, it will certainly sound different compared to the CD-quality counterpart, as they will be distorted and not sound the way they are intended to sound. If you want to listen to the 96+kHz songs without distortion, you need to get extremely expensive speakers, capable of reproducing those frequencies, only to discover, that it sounds just like the CD on your old system.
As for the bitdepth: 32bit is floating point and is only used for mixing. The end result will be integer, either 16bit or 24bit. Audio cards do not support 32bit at all. It just gets converted to 24bit first and then handled by the card for analogue conversion. Simple as that.
As for truehd, dtshd and flac: they are nothing more than losslessly compressed PCM audio. no fancy magic here. They sound the same, just take less space on your harddrive/blurays.AC3, MP3, Opus and so on are lossy. They do not store the whole original PCM sample, but loose information in order to reduce the filesize. If the bitrate is still high enough, you probably cannot hear a difference to its lossless cousin.
Decoding these audioformats with a compatible decoder/filter will result in PCM audio. Unless the decoder is buggy or not following the specifications, all decoders should result in the same PCM. the only difference between them should be performance/efficiency. Same goes for video as well, but this is more complicated (see deblocking).
If you have an av or stereo receiver, you should just output PCM (or encoded formats like TrueHD, if supported) and let the receiver handle the digital to analogue conversion. ATI HD Audio Device is probably the HDMI output of your laptop and that is always digital, not analog.
As for your vinyl collection: I also own a record player (Pioneer PL-550) and vinyls, though I still wouldn't digitize them at 96kHz. Just take a look at the specifications of the needle you are using. It's frequency range should be at around Human hearing, so just 20Hz to 22kHz. Extremely expensive ones might go up to 30kHz, but yeah, nothing beyond that. If you record at 96kHz, you are just wasting storage space... 48kHz should be plenty here as well. I recommend resampling them to 48kHz if you are running low on storage!
Personally, I set my soundcard to 24bit 48kHz for line out, line in and microphone. It can handle 96kHz as well, by my soundsystem and ears certainly cannot xD
P.S. Not sure where the article looses credibility, as I did not read anything contradictory. Please point it out
Though, I do recommend you do some blind listening tests online to check how good your ears are:
http://www.audiocheck.net/blindtests_frequency.php check your hearing frequency. I can handle distinguish up to 18-19kHz, depending on the time of day (it tends to be best in the morning!)
http://www.audiocheck.net/blindtests_level.php? check how well you distinguish loudness. 1db is my limit apparently.
Use headphones!
The laggy menu is a bug. It hasn't been dealt with as of yet. I will see if it is still present the next DSPlayer build, which should be out shortly.
