Output to McIntosh MA5300 DAC

[volfan]

So, I have a new McIntosh MA5300 and I'm messing around playing tracks from Tidal and Amazon Music on my 2018 MBP using a USB cable attached to my MA5300. The thing I noticed is that regardless of the native resolution of the track, the MA5300 always says that the sampling rate is 48Khz. After some searching I found how you can make some changes with the MIDI setup app and changed the rate to 32\384 which is the maximum available on the MA5300 using the USB input. Then all of the tracks I played displayed as 384Khz. So, is my MBP up sampling all of the tracks. I would think it would just send out the native digital format over USB.

What am I missing here?

 

[jerwin]

I think bitperfect does this.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bitperfect/id455545700

never used it though

 

[dotnet]

I use Audirvana to play all my music (FLACs, ALACs, AACs and DSD files) via USB to my DAC. Audirvana will upsample if you like, using a strategy of your choice, and high-quality SoX algorithms. I get it to upsample by factor of 2, up to 32/768 or 32/705.6, or play DSD as is.

 

[konqerror]

So, is my MBP up sampling all of the tracks. I would think it would just send out the native digital format over USB.

What am I missing here?

All computers, including Windows, output at a fixed sampling rate by default because they can play more than one sound at a time. It's necessary to convert so that you can mix two sounds that were stored at different sampling rates. You need an app that puts the sound device in exclusive mode, which locks out all other sounds.