The General Advice/Questions Thread

[bpcarb]

I believe your question has been asked and answered. It’s a reasonable question. There is no risk of the degradation of the digital data as it proceeds from its storage origin until it reaches the DAC and is converted to analog form.

Separate but related, you might find audio upsampling and the Chord Hugo M-Scaler interesting.

@Torq

The Chord Hugo M-Scaler, which is to my knowledge the most advanced and extreme hardware audio upsampled/filter available, uses an FPGA that provides 740 DSP cores, and utilizes 528 of those in parallel to upsample to 4096 fs before applying a 1,015,808 tap implementation of Rob Watt’s “WTA” filter, and reducing the final output rate to something the DAC can handle (upto 768 kHz in the case of Chord’s newer DACs). And even with such powerful hardware on tap, this incurs about a 1.4 second latency. And the result of this is effectively an ideal implementation of a sinc-filter that optimally recovers the originally sampled data for material up to 44.1 kHz and 16-bits, and gets closer than anything else I’m aware of for higher rates and bit-depths.