Quote:
Originally Posted by sotti
The benefit might be there, but it's neither expensive or complicated. It just needs to be part of the design. If a $15 sound card can do hi-res
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A $15 sound card supporting hi-res is like a toddler "supporting" $1000/oz caviar: does it work? Sure. Does it accomplish anything meaningful? nope.
There's a few reasons to use hi-res like low noise floor, micro-details, etc but that stuff is incredibly hard to hear, most people wouldn't notice even if their equipment can reproduce it, and that equipment - to do it well - is usually a few grand. at least. E.g., Focal Utopia headphones alone are $4,400, then you need good hi-fi electronics like amp, dac, & source. If you're extremely knowledgeable and experienced you can probably do that for $1,000 but most people who want those micro-details are going to more, say, $2,500 for a Schiit Yggy DAC, and at least another, say, $1,000 for a decent tube amp, but probably more like another $2,500. And then you need the interconnects, maybe clean power, etc, so plan on another $500-$1,000 ... thus, a "standard" high-res hi-fi headphone system will be in the $5k-$10k range.
Sure, it's absolutely possible to build something decent hi-res hi-fi for <$1000, say, Senn hd-600s ... but not without losing something. And that's headphones - about the cleanest speakers-to-ear system you can get (and with only 2 drivers); not the interior of an SUV! Hell, even a good pair of campfire ear buds are $1500 ...
Net-net: you can feed hi-res to a $15 dac chip, and you can feed hi-flav caviar to 15 month old baby ... but should you? Is there any value in doing it? Almost certainly not.
That was more the point.