How to get 24/96 DVD-Audio through analogue amp.

[real.africa]

I have a Rotel integrated stereo amp., RA311 connected to either a pair of Pioneer CS-757 speakers or Acoustic series 311 studio monitors.
Speakers are 8 ohm and will take 100watts or 150 music power (din),
Frequency response is 35~22KHz.
This is an old analogue system and is not top notch hi fi, but I will manage with it due to financial constraints.

I have a Panasonic DVD recorder DMR-ES20D (ES20deb on the manual), the latter seems to infer that the Panny will play DVD-Audio at 96KHz but does not specify bit rate. This manual also infers that DVD-Audio will be 'downsampled' to 16bit / 48KHz if output via the line out, but will not 'downsample' via the toslink out, if PCM conversion is set to 'off'.
I have spoken on the phone with Panasonic engineers and they are asking 'the factory' for more info., as even these engineers seem not to understand much about DVD-Audio at 24bit/96KHz and the panny's capabilities. They seem to think that no 24/96 can come out of the player because of DVD-Audio encryption codecs in the hardware put there to stop DVD copying.

Post is getting long so I'll cut it short for now.
I want to play 24/96 DVD-Audio discs, either pre-recorded or made by me on my 24/96 soundcard. I want to play the discs via this system and hear 24/96 quality [or at least better than CD quality] what do I need to buy to make that happen?

 

[TLS Guy]

I have a Rotel integrated stereo amp., RA311 connected to either a pair of Pioneer CS-757 speakers or Acoustic series 311 studio monitors.
Speakers are 8 ohm and will take 100watts or 150 music power (din),
Frequency response is 35~22KHz.
This is an old analogue system and is not top notch hi fi, but I will manage with it due to financial constraints.

I have a Panasonic DVD recorder DMR-ES20D (ES20deb on the manual), the latter seems to infer that the Panny will play DVD-Audio at 96KHz but does not specify bit rate. This manual also infers that DVD-Audio will be 'downsampled' to 16bit / 48KHz if output via the line out, but will not 'downsample' via the toslink out, if PCM conversion is set to 'off'.
I have spoken on the phone with Panasonic engineers and they are asking 'the factory' for more info., as even these engineers seem not to understand much about DVD-Audio at 24bit/96KHz and the panny's capabilities. They seem to think that no 24/96 can come out of the player because of DVD-Audio encryption codecs in the hardware put there to stop DVD copying.

Post is getting long so I'll cut it short for now.
I want to play 24/96 DVD-Audio discs, either pre-recorded or made by me on my 24/96 soundcard. I want to play the discs via this system and hear 24/96 quality [or at least better than CD quality] what do I need to buy to make that happen?

You can't do it. Your amp has no DACs. You can only use the analog outputs and inputs.

However you would not hear the difference in the bit rate and frequency.

A recent paper at AES showed that the CD at 16/44 is a adequate. Double blind tests showed that this was so. This was a rigorously conducted study.
This goes along with my observations. I have always mastered and archived at 16/44. I do not use lossy codecs.

 

[fmw]

You need to understand what 24/96 means. It means the music was recorded at 24 bits with a 96 khz sampling rate. When they mastered it to CD they had to convert it to 16/44.1 because those are the parameters for a CD. What the marketing wants you to believe is that a recording made at a higher bit and sampling rate and then converted down is better than one made at 16/44.1 in the first place. It is a contentious issue among recording engineers. However, bias controlled testing says there is no audible difference. These days virtually all recordings are made at a 24 bit depth just because it doesn't really cost anything. 96 khz is less common because it eats up quite a bit of computing power leaving the engineer with fewer processing options or fewer tracks in which to work. As I said, these recordings are then dithered to 16 bit and converted to 44.1 khz. for pressing.

If you have a "sound card" like mine you can play 24/96 recordings but, of course, you can't buy a 24/96 recording. You would have to record it yourself using those rates.

The reason we still use 16/44.1 as the red book standard for CD's after nearly 30 years is that it is all we need to capture sound with full fidelity. Anything you add to that isn't audible so only marketing has gone beyond it.

 

[real.africa]

I have learned quite a bit about all this HI Def audio since last I wrote here.
Seems that I have to get a better DVD player: one with 24bit/96kHz DACs. Then I have to use line out to this amplifier. With this set up I get 24/96 converted to analogue by the DACs in the DVD player.

So I bought a Pioneer 610 DVD player and things sound so much better!
However, now I realise I'm limited by this amp and speakers. Now lots of research hours are going into finding a better amp.

By the way all this talk of CD 16bit/44.1kHz was a bit off the mark. I never mentioned using CDs, only DVD-Audio. This format is all about
24bit/96kHz and there are some nice recordings on the market in this and the SACD format.