Now that we will have digital output boards available for our Empegs shortly, is there any reason (such as a hardware limitation) why the Empeg couldn't output 24 bit 96 KHz through the digital output add-on, provided that it could play a high resolution/sample rate file format? I know that the chip that the board uses is capable of handling this and other hi rez/sample rate formats. Ogg Vorbis and I believe AAC and various lossless compression formats support these as do of course uncompressed files.

Any thoughts?

Stu

IMO....

Without getting into headroom, oversampling, interpolation and all that sort of stuff I don't think there would be too much to gain.

Given that normal audio CDs only have 16 bits of resolution, I don't see how it would be any better. If you are using your SP/DIF card then you are probably already using a pretty high end D/A converter which means upsampling and converting to 24 bits wouldn't help too much since the original information was only 44.1kHz / 16 bits.

If you're talking about these new 24bit 96kHz "super" audio CDs as sources then that's a different story and it might be justified.

The hardware simply isn't capable of outputting anything other than 44.1kHz 16 bit. Sorry, that's the way it was designed - ideal match for CD audio.

Hugo