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But Sound Check is so convenient, as I don't have to constantly fuss with the volume when going from song to song or album to album. As for the Apple Music volume control employed with Sound Check, I have no idea how that works - it could be 32-bit float, or it could be 24-bit, or it could be 16-bit if the source material is 16-bit.įor pure performance/peace of mind the decision would be easy: turn off Sound Check and just use the Oppo's volume control. I am wondering if it's a bad thing to have Sound Check on? I control my overall volume with my Oppo 205, which has an excellent 64-bit digital volume control. (Recent versions of BitPerfect added the ability to detect and use Sound Check volume adjustments, but I never turned on that feature.) One question I have for you and/or the group, related to the resampling question: when I disabled BitPerfect, I realized that I had Sound Check enabled in the Music app. The combination of performance and energy efficiency is beyond what anyone imagined, especially since even the entry-level M1 is a total screamer for all non-pro uses and a good chunk of pro uses too. This is not a surprising result I suppose, but still, interesting to me. So far, with BitPerfect off and the sample rate therefore locked to 96kHz, I am not hearing any difference in sound quality when playing 44.1kHz material, compared to when BitPerfect is active. That leaves only the lack of on-the-fly sample-rate switching. So in the years since I got BitPerfect, Apple's built-in setup seems to have taken care of 2 of the 3 main features BitPerfect originally offered: matching the DAC's maximum/"preferred" bit depth, and providing the option to use integer mode for the output. And I was surprised to see that when I select my Oppo UDP-205 as the DAC, the mini automatically selects 32-bit output, which is exactly what BitPerfect does. Now there are choices for integer vs floating-point mode, which is nice (even if it doesn't make an audible difference). I went to Audio MIDI to set the output to 24/96 (since 99% of my library is 96kHz or lower sample rate) and I discovered that Apple's Core Audio options seem to have come a ways since I last used them years ago. You could set it to 24/192 I suppose, but I think 192kHz (and 176.4kHz) sample rates are so unnecessary and dumb that I personally would choose 96kHz myself.įollowing up on my prior comment, I'm now listening to my main system in its usual configuration except with BitPerfect disabled (my file streamer is a Mac mini running Apple's Music app). So I would recommend setting the Audio MIDI output to 24/96 and then forgetting about it. Personally I feel like upsampling philosophically just makes more sense since it's adding more data rather than removing it (though as a practical matter it doesn't matter). Sometimes practicality outweighs the effort of trying to fight one's own confirmation bias. (If I do hear a difference, even if it's just confirmation bias, I will keep BitPerfect in the chain, since it does no harm and the $10 I spent on it was spent long ago and was totally worth the peace of mind it afforded when I was under the impression that it mattered more than it actually does. I suspect I won't, but it will be an interesting experiment. In fact, I keep meaning to turn off BitPerfect and do some listening to see if I can hear any difference even in a sighted/biased comparison test. Even with non-integer conversion (like 44.1 to 96) it's not likely to produce any audible effect. However, thanks to and others, I have become a lot less concerned about sample-rate conversion since I became a member of this site. I used to be very concerned about this, and as a result purchased the $10 BitPerfect app, which sits between iTunes/Music app and the underlying MacOS, allowing on-the-fly resolution-switching (and also integer mode rather than floating-point mode, which keeps things bit-perfect). This is the major weakness of Apple's built-in core audio processing: it cannot do on-the-fly resolution switching. The padding of the bit depth is totally irrelevant - in fact, most "bit perfect" software that claims to leave the original signal totally unaltered will still pad 16-bit (and sometimes 24-bit) content with extra zeroes to match the maximum/default/internal PCM bit-depth of the receiving DAC. So if the Apple MIDI output resolution is set to 24/192, then everything - 16/44.1, 24/48, 24/96, 24/88.2 - will be upsampled to 192kHz, and any 16-bit source will have 8 bits' worth of zeros padded onto each PCM word to convert it to 24 bit. Not sure if you meant to type 24/192 or 24/96, but either way the Apple OS is going to convert everything to that resolution.