which dac? 16bit/44khz or 24bit/192khz?

[modenar1]

As i mentioned in another thread. i got my uncle a Mac and im slowly ripping his cd collection onto the laptop in FLAC format. and to maintain the best quality of sound, i told him he should get an external DAC. now my question is. ive heard to get the best quality sound, you have to decrease the amount of digital filtering and sampling. so my concern is, since i am ripping cds, which are in 16bit/ 44khz. wouldnt it be better if i get a DAC with the same specs. or should i go with a DAC with higher sampling? my choices are between the Fubar II DAC and M-Audio DAC. both USB compatible.

 

[MDS]

24/192 DACS won't do anything for you because as you said you have FLAC ripped from a CD which is 16/44.1. If you had 24/192 DACS, it will still process the 16/44.1 stream at 16/44.1.

Now some receivers and maybe some external DACS may 'upsample' but that is dubious as well. Upsampling is interpolation; ie 'intelligent guessing' to create new samples where none previously existed. While it will move quantization noise to higher frequencies, you won't hear a night and day difference because a properly dithered 16/44.1 signal already masks any quantization noise quite well.