Win 7 - Sampling Rate/Bit Depth settings?

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John721

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Mar 8, 2006
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Hi all,

I just finished setting up my PC's (5.1) hdmi audio out to my Denon AVR1612 receiver, and I was wondering what sampling rate and bit depth settings most folks are using on their PC (called default format in Windows 7).

I know a lot of sources are 16bit / 44.1khz, but I was feeling tempted to just set it to 24bit 192khz and forget it. Perhaps just in case I ever did play anything higher than average. Any pitfalls or downsides to doing this? What's everyone else with similar setups using? Thanks in advance.

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Depends on what you plan on doing with the audio to be honest. If you want the best quality for most audio CD's then best to leave it at 16bit 44.1kHz, or you can use say the WASAPI plugin in Foobar2000.

If you are playing bluray via the computer that will be bitstreamed anyway, and AFAIK any DD or DTS soundtracks should be passed bit-perfect to the amp anyway. So maybe just leave it at 16/44.1 anyway.
 
Only way to know is to test. If you want to use 24bit 192kHz, you'll practically always be upsampling your source, which may or may not be good depending on how your system manages upsampling. Practically no commercially available audio is 24/192...very little is even sampled at 24/96. At my old workplace we were still using 16 or 24/48 for all our in-house produced audio archives.
 
Mine generally stays at 44.1 as CD Audio is the most critical listening that I do most of the time. On the odd occasion that I listen to some higher resolution music I manually reset it to match the source, and I definetly notice the lack of detail in CD Audio when I forget to switch it back after.

As mentioned above, most all video sources have encoded bitstream audio which will be unaffected by this setting, but I think most game sounds are at 48khz so this may be a consideration to you also.
 
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