A quick DAC Oversampling poll

Do you use Oversampling…

  • No
  • Yes
  • Sometimes
  • What’s Oversampling

0 voters

Wouldn’t that really come down to the dac at hand?

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Hmmm interesting…

Take holo for an example, imo NOS is a lot better than their built in oversampling, to where I’d just suggest most people run nos. You can if you want upsample elsewhere for better results than the holo accomplishes internally with hqplayer, but I’d still say imo nos is better on that dac, but I could see it come down to pairing and preference

Another r2r mfg like rockna however I feel performs better in oversampling mode rather than nos, so I’d personally suggest people consider oversampling than nos on that dac.

With sigma delta dacs, you typically don’t have a choice and most are oversampling by nature, although some allow for filter bypass but they still oversample.

I used to think I had a preference for NOS dacs, but I’ve really just found it depends on the dac, and now I’m about 50/50 when it comes to dacs I own, 2 nos, 2 os. While there are some commonalities between nos and os throughout dacs, it really comes down to the dac at hand, as they can vary a pretty decent amount of sounds

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Does the synergy between the DAC and Amp make a difference when it comes to your preferred DAC OS choice?

I think so yes, but that also assumes that the quality of said modes are equal, as that can potentially dictate otherwise. On some dacs, if they have both modes, some of them really aren’t great compared to the other

Definitely depends on the DAC. Some sound better when oversampling often because they were designed with oversampling and/or restoration of the audio signal as their intended mode of use. Others sound best with NOS mode applied. Another variable that comes into play is what source files you’re working with. If you have high quality material going in it often sounds best to leave it “untouched” by oversampling filters, but files of lesser quality can sometimes benefit from various filters being applied. That’s been my experience anyhow.