In this limited industry somewhat exclusively does upsample mean resample by async sample rate converter (and it was pretty much a made-up term), which most people know, but what they don’t know is that the underlying technology which is pretty much exclusively some form of synchronous oversampling in the form of fractional delay filters, which provides an underlying shift upwards in the spectra from the original sample rate, coupled with a time compensated curve-fit which provides for the final sample rate and provides the jitter attenuation (something not needed with async streaming sources of course). So when claiming advantage of upsampling to a higher frequency, is it the inherent oversampling, the jitter reduction, or the pick of final sample rate, or some combination of?
As Cleeds pointed out, you can’t make a generalization to all cases based on one example.
That Benchmark found that "performance" based on data sheet and some simple performance metrics was better at 24/96 than 24/192 is not at all surprising. At lower speeds, you have less contribution to the output from the switching CMOS switches, less dynamic power (and less glitch energy) contributing to a quieter environment, and even simply more time to settle to the final value. Perhaps in Benchmark’s specific case, decoupling the output frequency from the input also removed sources of synchronous noise. Of course, they are running in 2x mode anyway, so technically the DAC is running close to 192KHz internally, so what exactly does that 96KHz even mean in their argument ... not to mention that it then runs into a much higher rate sigma-delta modulator. Does their product match the data, or does the data match the product ?
However, the items they cited w.r.t the data sheets and their tests, are not guarantees of excellent perceived sonic performance which would trade off high sample rate, system noise, with analog filtering. The article is also 10 years old, so what was best 10 years ago, may have shifted up 2x or more in terms of what was best.
I don’t think you have well made your point, simply because tests have been done with 24/96 native, and 24/96 down-sampled mathematically to 16/44.1 and then upsampled to 24/96 so that the playback path was identical, all that was changed was the information rate.
As Cleeds pointed out, you can’t make a generalization to all cases based on one example.
That Benchmark found that "performance" based on data sheet and some simple performance metrics was better at 24/96 than 24/192 is not at all surprising. At lower speeds, you have less contribution to the output from the switching CMOS switches, less dynamic power (and less glitch energy) contributing to a quieter environment, and even simply more time to settle to the final value. Perhaps in Benchmark’s specific case, decoupling the output frequency from the input also removed sources of synchronous noise. Of course, they are running in 2x mode anyway, so technically the DAC is running close to 192KHz internally, so what exactly does that 96KHz even mean in their argument ... not to mention that it then runs into a much higher rate sigma-delta modulator. Does their product match the data, or does the data match the product ?
However, the items they cited w.r.t the data sheets and their tests, are not guarantees of excellent perceived sonic performance which would trade off high sample rate, system noise, with analog filtering. The article is also 10 years old, so what was best 10 years ago, may have shifted up 2x or more in terms of what was best.
I don’t think you have well made your point, simply because tests have been done with 24/96 native, and 24/96 down-sampled mathematically to 16/44.1 and then upsampled to 24/96 so that the playback path was identical, all that was changed was the information rate.