My Cyrus CDt-XR transport when playing a cd on my Directstream DAC shows as 24bit 44.1? I would have thought it should be 16bit/44.1. The Cyrus can only play 16bit/44.1 cd’s and I have used other devices with my DAC and they show the correct bit depth when playing a cd quality file. Any ideas why this might be happing?
The DS looks at the bits and tells you how many are changing/non-zero. If it says 24 then the low bits aren’t (always) zero.
This often happens if there’s some kind of processing going on, even just a volume control. (Or, at times, an absolute phase inversion.)
At times it can indicate that the connection to the DAC isn’t reliable, but you will almost always hear a bit of fuzz (or worse) when there are a significant number of errors.
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Is the Cyrus transport padding/dithering?
There is a audio phase button on the remote control (phase normal and phase invert). If playing a cd and I select phase normal it shows as 18bit 44.1 and if I select phase invert it shows 24bit 44.1?
Is this an HDCD instead of a “plain” CD?
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Hi
Its not a HDCD, just a normal cd.
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Well it’s acting like an HDCD 
There were a number of CDs that were mastered with a Pacific Microsonincs HDCD mastering workstation that are marked as HDCD in the raw data, even if they aren’t explicitly using any of the HDCD transforms. This leads to 18 bit values instead of 16 bit values and when you invert them (or 16 bit values) you end up with 6 (or 8) lower order 1’s which causes the DS to report 24 bits.
Everything is probably working as designed, your player apparently supports HDCD discs and you probably have a non-marked HDCD disc. If there’s a function to disable HDCD on your player that will show 16 bits on the DS, but it won’t make them sound better.
There’s still a remote chance that your player is doing some other processing, but 18 bits is a pretty telling number of bits.
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thanks for the info. all discs I have tried are doing the same so pretty sure they are all not hdcd discs. it must be something to do with the Cyrus player as I have a Audiolab cd transport as well and when using this the same discs show 16bit/44.1.
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It could be that it’s HDCD detector is broken or that they used a Pacific Microsonics D/A chip (they sounded very good in their day) but didn’t wire it up or configure it quite right.
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hi ted
my Cyrus is a transport only with no DAC onboard.
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Duh Brainfart on my part.
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Then I have no good hypothesis of why it’s acting like that … But I’m very confident that the DS is telling you accurately what it’s seeing.
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hi ted
I guess if its showing 18bit or 24bit instead of the correct 16bit the sound quality will not be affected in any way.
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Without knowing what might be wrong, it hard to tell, but it’s probable that, as worst, it’s only the low two bits that are stuck on, random, or whatever. None of these are very audible in normal use. It could also be some sort of volume control which would probably be even harder to hear (it’s the 16 bit volume controls that output only 16 bits that gave digital volume controls a bad reputation.)
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I experience the same thing at home, even though my name tag says “Al” my wife calls me Steve.
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I know it’s not related - I just like to throw my two cents where it’s not needed - but when using the Qobuz Windows app, and playing 16/44.1 streams, the depth alternates between 16 and 24 bits. Many times, it will initially seem stable, then start switching back and forth.
This occurs both when sending music directly to the DS and sending it to the DS via JRiver’s WDM driver (where other software sees JRiver as an output device.
When using BubbleUpnp to stream from Qobuz through JRiver (as a network player), the phenomenon does not occur. The switching back and forth also does not occur on anything Qobuz at 24 bits.
I have the Qobuz Windows app. I have an old Dell desktop with Windows 10 operating system that goes to the Innous Phoenix and then the P S Audio Direct Stream DAC. When I am listening to a Qobuz recording, my DAC always says that it is streaming at 24 bits instead of 16 bits. On my Dell computer, under Volume Mixer- Speaker (P S Audio DAC), I click on Speaker, and it opens up to Speaker Properties. Under Speaker Properties, I go to Advanced. This offers me a choice of sound from 16 bits to 24 bits and 44100 Hz to 192000 Hz. I go for the highest and apply. I don’t know if this is the best sound option, but it sound great to me!
I use either WASAPI Exclusive or ASIO as needed without going through Windows mixer to keep the data “bit-perfect” - no alteration. Once the data stream starts going through the Windows mixer, you can never be sure what’s coming out the other end. Haven’t really piddled with KS (Kernel Streaming) which is the lowest level of communication in Windows (WASAPI and ASIO drivers already utilize KS well enough).