Hey guys and gals,
So I recently switched over to a separates system
Elac unifi reference dbr6
Schiit vidar
Schiit saga +
Denafrips ares ii
I stream via usb using audirvana.
I noticed that the bit rate of the music is locked at 32 bit. Is this happening because of the dac or is this a setting in audirvana.
When I was running audirvana through my sprout 100 this wasn’t fixed, which is why it leads me to believe it’s something that the dac is doing?
Thank you for any help!!
It’s been years since I used anything like Audirvana but if I remember correctly you might want to see if you can enable “Integer Mode”. By default, audio samples in macOS are processed as 32-bit floating point numbers. That can still remain bit-perfect depending on what kinds of numeric operations are performed on them, but that same format is often sent to USB audio devices which need to perform a conversion from floating point to a relevant integer format. So your DAC/DDC is probably just telling you that the data it’s receiving is still in that format and it’s having to do the conversion. “Integer Mode” in Audirvana and other software products works in conjunction with exclusive access to the USB Audio device and allows you to send the audio samples as 16 or 24-bit integers instead. For some combinations of DACs and ears, that produces a change in sound which the listener might find preferable.