I suddenly noticed that while playing Qobuz connected through USB to my Spring 3 the bitrate changes on the Spring’s screen although the Mac is known to push out everything at 44.1K (unless you change it to a higher setting but it’s always the same value).
Did something change and I miss the news?
For comparison - running Roon with Qobuz shows the regular expected behavior.
If you have the spring selected as your desired sound output on qobuz it will automatically switch sample rates for you to whatever file you’re trying to play back. So if you’re playing an 88.2 track it will switch accordingly (depending on the software and settings it will switch back to the last selected sample rate set on MIDI or it will leave it as is). It should be the same for roon and other music playback software, except the native Mac music app (which I hope gets implemented in the next major software update).
Ya get double the answer! Lol
If Roon isn’t switching the sample rate and bit-depth to match the file, then you either don’t have exclusive mode enabled for the output device (Settings, Audio, Enable or Select the Specific Device, Click the Gear icon), you’ve enabled resampling (in DSP) or you’re using the “System Output” (instead of enabling the device itself and talking directly to it).
Roon’s done proper bit-perfect output on the Mac since the start.
In this case I’m indeed using system output since the Mac is both the core and the player when I tried to compare the behavior to what I’ve seen happening on Qobuz.
When I use Roon to play in one of my endpoints it absolutely works as intended with switching rates.
@hifiDJ I’ll check this with another DAC I have around the house since I remember the Mac didn’t switch with it and I had to manually set the settings in MIDI to 192
Your Mac can be the core, and the player, without using the System Output. I do that on my travel laptops all the time. You can still talk directly to any locally attached (e.g. USB) DAC or any end-point.
But as long as you’re using the System Output, you won’t get automatic sample rate or bit-depth switching in Roon.
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Qobuz on macOS has switched rates automatically, for external DACs (i.e. not the system/internal output) for as long as I can remember, also.
Great I’ll check the roon settings then and good to know about Qobuz, not sure how I could’ve missed it but not anymore. Thanks Torq