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Playing bit-perfect music on your Macintosh

fcruz said:
Can you please share a link to that blog? Very curious as to how all that works. Thanks.
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The article was informative, certainly. I recall reading articles among Benchmark's audio application notes then following a link, but I couldn't find the item I remembered after a quick look recently.

I did find an item on playing hi-res from iPad which said:
... the iPad can transparently stream high-resolution digital audio to the USB input of DAC1 converters. Even more remarkable, the iPad is able to wirelessly stream a 96-kHz, 24-bit audio file via Wi-Fi without losing sonic quality.
Click to expand...
More detail in the article iPad streams high-resolution audio to Benchmark DAC1 (there's also a pdf version) including some testing. That's interesting, but not about upsampling (in fact it's confirming no downsampling). I also found a brief reference in another article Computer audio playback setup guide to Apple's upsampling which was less sanguine and more qualified:
Although the quality of the sample-rate conversion in iTunes is surprisingly good, it is an unnecessary DSP process which is best avoided.
Click to expand...

Both interesting articles. Now it's possible I conflated the two items and there is no more detail via Benchmark on Apple's upsampling quality. Or there is something, but I can't find it. That's all I can say for certain at the moment, sorry.
 
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Axo1989 said:
The article was informative, certainly. I recall reading articles among Benchmark's audio application notes then following a link, but I couldn't find the item I remembered after a quick look recently.

I did find an item on playing hi-res from iPad which said:

More detail in the article iPad streams high-resolution audio to Benchmark DAC1 (there's also a pdf version) including some testing. That's interesting, but not about upsampling (in fact it's confirming no downsampling). I also found a brief reference in another article Computer audio playback setup guide to Apple's upsampling which was less sanguine and more qualified:


Both interesting articles. Now it's possible I conflated the two items and there is no more detail via Benchmark on Apple's upsampling quality. Or there is something, but I can't find it. That's all I can say for certain at the moment, sorry.
Click to expand...
With Apple Music lossless from iPad or iPhone with lightning cable to a dac, there is no upsampling or downsampling - iPad always plays the native material up to 192 KHz .

Not so with Mac , where you must change sample freq manually for different records in the midi setting .

With a third program, like losslesswitcher, you can have auto changing to correct sample freq on Mac .
 
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Tangband said:
With Apple Music lossless from iPad or iPhone with lightning cable to a dac, there is no upsampling or downsampling - iPad always plays the native material up to 192 KHz. Not so with Mac , where you must change sample freq manually for different records in the midi setting. With a third program, like losslesswitcher, you can have auto changing to correct sample freq on Mac .
Click to expand...
Yes, I'm aware of all that. The question from @fcruz requested a link to an article I may have read on quality of upsampling on macOS (which I didn't find). The aside in the iPad article about playing 24/96 wirelessly was interesting, however.
 
Axo1989 said:
Yes, I'm aware of all that. The question from @fcruz requested a link to an article I may have read on quality of upsampling on macOS (which I didn't find). The aside in the iPad article about playing 24/96 wirelessly was interesting, however.
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Much appreciated. Definitely have some reading to do.
 
tmtomh said:
Does LosslessSwitcher still require you to manually change the output sample rate, or does it allow true automated on-the-fly switching like BitPerfect?
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Literally the first thing you read when you open LosslessSwitcher's website:
Screenshot_20221118-191217_Chrome.png
 
THX gives this advice, which might be a solution that avoids clunky third party apps or expensive alternatives. It is what I have done.
“Apple Music for MacOS doesn’t have an exclusive mode, so the macOS audio output format is set by MacOS Audio Midi Setup. If you’ve chosen 24-bit 176.4 kHz… then all Apple Music playback will be upsampled to that rate…“ (If using a USB DAC). “We recommend 176.4 kHz because it’s an integer multiple of 44.1 kHz and 88.2 kHz, to ensure lossless upsampling for nearly all music.”
 
So if I stream Qobuz Music from my Mac via optical to my DAC and I select 96/24 in midi... All music in 44.1/24 going to be upsampled to 96/24? The heck?
 
MrNice13 said:
So if I stream Qobuz Music from my Mac via optical to my DAC and I select 96/24 in midi... All music in 44.1/24 going to be upsampled to 96/24? The heck?
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Yes, but the quality of upsampling in the Mac is MUCH better than a windows machine. Its so good I doubt you can hear the difference between 44.1 kHz and upsampled 96 kHz. A purist approach is ofcourse to always listen to the native sampling frequency.

SRC Comparisons

src.infinitewave.ca src.infinitewave.ca
IMG_0690.png
 
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Tangband said:
Yes, but the quality of upsampling in the Mac is MUCH better than a windows machine. Its so good I doubt you can hear the difference between 44.1 kHz and upsampled 96 kHz. A purist approach is ofcourse to always listen to the native sampling frequency.

SRC Comparisons

src.infinitewave.ca src.infinitewave.ca
View attachment 285131
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hell of a difference !
 
staticV3 said:
Apparently Qobuz will switch sample rates automatically:
https://forum.headphones.com/t/new-bit-perfect-audio-on-mac-puzzled/17945

But it won't have exclusive USB access to the DAC:
https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/qobuz-is-not-bitperfect-through-mac.1166606/
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need too use a player to have the exclusive mode on Mac like audirvana..Jriver or Roon... so everyone that was using Qobuz with a external DAC was thinking getting bit perfect but is not the case..
 
Need to have UAPP for MAC users .. it works flawlessly on android and you got exclusive.
 
apastuszak said:
I have a Topping D10s that I bought based on Amir's review, and was deeply disappointed when I found out that most Apple music players WILL NOT switch sample rate and bit depth on the fly when you play a 24/192 song or a DSD file. There are players available which will do that, but they cost $10, $20, even $40, and often don't get good reviews. Some are still in the Mac app store, but are pretty much abandonware, not seeing updates for as long as 3 years.

Particularly disappointing was Apple Music, that now supports up to 24/192, but the DAC will not auto switch to 24/192. You can force it to 24/192 using the Midi Settings app, but then it's stuck there and when you play 16/44.1, it's upsampling everything.

To be clear from the outset, I'm in the "CD is as good as it gets" camp, when it comes to digital music. But I really wanted to find a way to get this to work.

Because I am a cheap bastard, I wanted to find a free solution.

And I found one: the venerable mpd.

mod happily switches sample rates on the fly and will even play DSD using DoP.

But I struggled setting it up, so I figure I would post the audio_output section of my config that finally works, so you don't waste 30 min figuring this out:

audio_output { type "osx" name "D10s " device "D10s " # optional mixer_type "disabled" dop "yes"

The two things here that tripped me up were:
  • The name and device lines. For some reason Apple adds a space to the end of the device name for the DAC. This is not unique to the D10s. It has done it for every USB DAC I have connected.
  • The dop line enables DSD over PCM.
I only have 2 ripped SACDs, but when I play the dsf files, the DAC now shows "2.82 DSD" on the display, and when I switch back to a CD quality FLAC is says "44.1 PCM."

I really like mpd, because I can control it from my iPhone or my Mac, or from the Mac terminal.

I hope this post helps someone.
Click to expand...
Apple Music used with a cable into your Mac should auto bitrate. Your library files should do the same. DSD I have no idea.
 
I'm new to MAC, but thought I'd add my tuppence worth here anyway. Came to this thread while looking for a way to stream bit perfect audio to a DAC from my work M2 MBP, for personal use I use a Linux (Ubuntu) laptop with Squeezelite (with a Quobuz plugin on the LMS server) which happily does bit perfect audio.
Re. the Qobuz app, if system sounds etc. are played whilst Qobuz is playing music, then it's not bit perfect. Bit perfect generally requires kernel access to the audio streams and as Apple have changed their architecture to ARM with the M chips that can be a problem.
Re. sample rate conversion, I agree the Mac is far ahead of Window and in most cases Linux too, although the Jack plugins can be excellent. As mentioned, generally speaking integer conversions are generally easy to do with little or no effect on quality; for instance droping from 96k to 48k is just dropping every other sample, not sure about going the other way ideally the additional sample should be interpolated from the preceding and succeeding one.
Non integer conversions are much ore difficult, I once went to a Sony pro-audio training course where they explained their process for this. In essence they would upsample the incoming stream to a sample frequency that is an integer multiple of the source and destination sample frequencies, using an finite fourier transform filter to fill in the missing samples, then pluck the relevant samples from the over-sampled intermediate stream. The results were very good and far better than most other options around at the time. Not sure of current practices, I've been out of the Pro-audio recording world for a while now.
Hope some of the waffle is of interest to some one. Might have a play with bitperfect and lossless at some point. For now I'll stick with the Linux machine as it sounds great and the squeeze box / LMS system passes Qobuz and local files through bit-perfect, leaving the DAC to switch. Incidentally, it also does the same with BBC Sounds feeds, picking the highest bitrate stream availble which is 320kps AAC. Sounds nice on Radio 3 although the other music stations dynamically compress the life out of their output!
 
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