When playing music from Plex Home Theater the audio is converted to the sample rate set in "midi settings" on Mac OS X (eg. 48khz). This is hazardous to audio quality but there is a solution...
…There should be an option in PHT (turned off by default) to change Plex to a hog mode where it automatically switches OS X sample rate output to e.g. 96khz.
I love what you've done to Plex recently and for me it is almost perfect. This would be that last piece of the puzzle to convince me to use it for my music as well as my movies.
This would be a small change that would make a huge difference.
This is an excerpt from a post another user wrote years ago:
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"[…] if a file is being played with a sample rate of 41.1khz (CD quality), the audio output device's sample rate should automatically be set to 44.1khz when that file starts playing. When you switch to a higher resolution file, say 96khz 24bit (like those available from hdtracks or vinyl rips), it should adjust your output device to that sample rate and bit depth. Leaving the audio device at a high level uses unnecessary processing power and introduces distortion on lower quality files. Leaving it at lower quality severely impacts the quality of the higher quality audio files.
Here is how I propose it be set up:
Under the audio output device in system preferences, add an option for "Device sample rate" with the option of "Do not change" selected by default. The other option should be "Match media" which will adjust the setting automatically depending on the media being played. If the device does not have multiple output depth options, it should not allow that option to be selected.
Audirvana is open source audiophile playback software for the Mac that allows these settings. Most of the code required to change the settings and detect the information from the media file is available from the google source repository. It should not be difficult to integrate this option into Plex using the existing code in audirvana."
But I am dedicated to Mac OS X and changing my operation to Windows is not just a reasonable solution for me. It would cause to many problems for me both professionally and for my personal computer usage.
I would give it a try anyway since with bootcamp you don't have to give up OSX.
I also used to change manually the settings on OSX. On the other hand OSX seems not to be very supportiv when it comes to high definition content while the hardware itself can do much better.
When I changed from OSX to Win on the computer connected to my Stereo not only I saw the little lights on my DAC moving by themselves but what really gave me the goosbumbs was the emprovement in sound quality.
There might be something true about what somebody already remarked on other site: "Mac users will most likely never hear a real difference between HD and non HD-content"
