Hello all,
I recently purchased a ASUS Xonar Essense STX card and I'm interested in
tweaking pulseaudio to get the most sine wave for my buck. For those of
you that may or may not know, the card above has a hardware chip for up
to 24-bit/192kHz processing. I plan on using the card for music
listening and single source recording (think vinyl records). No audio
production here so low-latency throughput doesn't matter to me.
Google searching for a few days has driven me to this mailing list as I
cannot find any straight answer. The PA wiki doesn't seem to have an
audiophile area.
Background info:
Most of my music are 16-bit/44.1kHz recordings. I am expanding more and
more of it to include 24-bit/96kHz. I have a fast, quad-core CPU so CPU
usage will not be a problem if I need to use a resampler that is
computationally expensive.
My limited knowledge of audio properties has made me ask myself three
things:
1) Is Pulseaudio even the right man for the job? A friend of mine wants
to do away with PA and use Jack. He's only using it for music listening
(no recording) so this seems like a bad idea. Is it? I still need to be
able to have sounds come from non-music player apps. Example: wine for
Starcraft 2 ;)
2) default-sample-format
Is it beneficial to set this to s32le? Any negative effects for
16-bit tracks?
3) default-sample-rate
Is it beneficial to set this to 96000? I realize anything beyond
this is not able to be comprehended by our brains so I don't see a need
to flirt with the 192kHz top range of the card. However, the same friend
from above feels that upsampling constantly "is a bad thing" and should
be avoided because of going from 44.1k to 96k "averages samples". Is
this right? How else will I hear my 96k recordings if I leave PA on 44.1k?
Any other tips or comments are appreciated.
Thanks,
Michael
