IMO current DAC's will be redundant in 5 years, not because of better DAC's, but because of digital amplifiers. Squeezebox will most likely have an (optional) integrated digital amp. Digital amps will also have HDMI inputs, which will support copy protection (HDCP I think they're calling it).
As for frequency response of CD's, the problem of limiting them to 44kHz sample rates is the extreme filtering required to remove artifacts above 20kHz. Oversampling does this filtering in the digital domain. Upsampling (per my understanding) allows some artifacts through. e.g. 44kHz upsampled to 96kHz will create artifacts in the 20-40kHz region. It will then be oversampled to get rid of the higher frequency artifacts. This may sound better for the following reasons - firstly, it moves the harsh filtering futher away from the audible region, secondly, the artifacts approximate energy that was originally there, and whilst we can't hear this directly, it may affect our perception of sound below 20kHz. EDIT: probably more importantly than either of the above 2 points is that the artifacts introduced by upsampling help to 'even out' errors in the DAC. -- bludragon ------------------------------------------------------------------------ bludragon's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=1530 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=17948 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
