I’m trying to figure out the specs of the built-in dac.
Can someone confirm if it has 24/32 bit and can play lossless at 192khz?
In the spec sheet I have only seen HD audio.
If someone can give me a quick review of the dac and the audio quality that would be great.
Trying to figure out if I only need the Vero 4k or if I need to have another Raspberry Pi with a dac to play my lossless library.
Thanks in advance.
André
Hello,
It does 16-bit up to 192Khz and all major HD audio formats.
Sam
Thank you.
Any future plans for 24 or 32-bit? (next device?)
Would be great with a Vero 4k for the audiophiles.
There’s not going to be a hardware refresh for a long time.
Sam
But the Toslink socket can send 24/192 stereo PCM streams to an AVR. The HDMI connection also supports 24/192 audio up to 8 channels. So, there should be two options to send either stereo or multichannel audio with 24bit 192kHz to an AVR…
Audiophiles might now ask about jitter and whether there are seperate oscillators for multiples of 44.1kHz and 48kHz via S/PDIF. That would suprise me, if it was present, but the basic transport of audiophile audio streams should be possible.
Great answer Wuschel_Wuschel.
Thank you.
According to the spec sheet for the S905X Wesion publish, the DAC does up to 24 bit, 8-96kHz. I haven’t been able to A/B it with an ‘audiophile’ DAC but sounds quite sweet to me.
96Khz was an artificial limitation in the kernel, has been 192 for some time.
Sam
My old ears would sooner have 24-bit than 192k anyway
Well, I guess, as audio out via S/PDIF and HDMI is possible with full 24/192, why would one choose to use the internal DAC for analogue out?
The analogue out will definitely be far inferior to an AVR or amp with a dedicated DAC - and definitely not good enough to satisfy an audiophile 
I don’t know how you can say that with such certainty. Yes, it’s probably worse than $1000 DACs but I don’t think ‘far’ is proven.
It was an educated guess… The board’s main purpose is not creating a good analogue sound reproduction. But you’re right, I’m not an expert 
Would assume that an external DAC built just for that purpose is superior. At least I’d expect it to be 
That I’m sure about though - audiophiles and on-board DACs don’t go well together usually. And @andre3030 was asking “for the audiophiles”.
One solution to this is to send not as PCM, but as any compressed format that the AVR understands. Since a compressed format can’t be decoded until an entire packet of the format is received, it must be completely re-clocked by the AVR, so there is no wire-induced jitter.
But that defeats the object - is jitter worse than compression/decompression?
It definitely defeats the purpose
But if one likes the sound and is happy with it… What else matters?
Lossless compression (FLAC, TrueHD, DTS HD-MA) will result in a bit-perfect copy of the original data being output by the AVR.
Because of the re-clocking, the only “problem” will be a small delay (the length of a packet of the chosen compression system) that is insignificant, even when trying to match audio to video.
FLAC cannot be sent to the AVR via bitstreaming without decoding to PCM. And as far as I know there’s only one device that supports on the fly encoding of audio to Dolby TrueHD at the moment and that would be a Windows PC with the Atmos package installed - which encodes all audio to Dolby TrueHD when there’s no Atmos capability of a game e.g.: So, an Atmos stream without the Atmos metadata.
But that’s not perfect either as it ignores the original bitdepth and sampling rate of the source audio.
So: PCM is the only option when you want to stream lossless audio that is not pre-encoded as some kind of Dolby/DTS stream in a bit-perfect manner.
But i thought we are talking about audio over S/PDIF which does not support lossless other than PCM. (says Wikipedia).
Both S/PDIF and HDMI, I think: Vero 4K - Audio Specs - #5 by Chillbo
And both would be affected by jitter when it comes to audiophiles… If it’s audible, that’s quite another cup of tea… 
And it’s a discussion for another time and place, I’d say.
The OP was about the DAC. You then introduced the jitter issue which applies only to S/PDIF. As I understand it, HDMI streams are packetised so must be re-clocked at the receiving end.